in recent years, virtual communities have been significantly popular and almost all of them are targeted for business profitability. in our study, the profitability of these communities for businesses has been analyzed from a commercial perspective. the study considers virtual community as a business model which can have a great impact on consumer purchase decision process. with respect to refe...

Recent cultural heritage applications have been based on rich-content virtual environment (VE), in which virtual humans can communicate with visitors and other agents using natural language (NL). We propose to use the semantic modelling of the VE and the activities of the agents for the conceptualisation of the dialogue. Meta level semantic information are used as arguments in NLU/NLG rules. Th...

In this paper we will give a short overview of the areas where VRML —the Virtual Reality Modelling Language— has to be extended in order to support collaborative virtual environments on the Internet. We will present extensions which allow an adequate representation of the individual participant within the virtual world. We will show how our approach supports shared interactions and behaviours, ...

In this paper, we present our current study on the design of a virtual agent able to express sentences in Sign Language (SL), so-called ‘Virtual Signer’, in the context of interactive web-based applications. Up now, little work has been carried out on web-based virtual signers. As for current research on virtual signers in standalone applications, it relies on two main approaches: Pre-synthesiz...

The recent developments in image-based rendering have enabled a representation of virtual environments based on a simulation of panoramas, which we call virtual panoramas. Current virtual panorama systems do not provide a natural and immersive interaction with the environment. We propose a new system that uses hardware and software components to provide a natural and immersive interaction with ...

This paper suggests virtual types for Java, a language mechanism which subsumes parameterized classes, while also integrating more naturally with Java’s object model. The same basic mechanism is also known as virtual patterns in Beta and as generics in Ada95. We discuss various issues in the Java type system, issues with inheritance and genericity in general, and give a specific suggestion as t...

Learning a language is said to implicate self-concept in a way that does not occur in other disciplines, and to entail a particular kind of anxiety related only to language situations (see Gardner & Mac Intyre, 1993; Horwitz, Horwitz & Cope, 1986, 1991). To date, however, research into affective learner variables such as anxiety, self-confidence and motivation and their impact on learner perfor...

With sensor networks starting to get mainstream acceptance, programmability is of increasing importance. Customers and field engineers will need to reprogram existing deployments and software developers will need to test and debug software in network testbeds. Script languages, which are a popular mechanism for reprogramming in general-purpose computing, have not been considered for wireless se...