Virtual worlds provide an arena for children to express themselves and to interact with others. They are a natural and frequent part of children’s life today. However, there is not much research on what actually happens in the online worlds and what kind of opportunities those worlds could offer to children and thereby enhance their social participation. The aim in this study is to explore the ...

Businesses are beginning to use virtual worlds as an innovative means for collaboration and learning among virtual team members, with the intention of harnassing increasing flow of ideas from individuals, and higher levels of productivity within the company. Virtual worlds have paved a new and important channel for user collaboration and information sharing. Motivated by this phenomenon and dra...

Among the most remarkable developments in metaphysics since the 1950’s is the explosion of philosophical interest in possible worlds. This paper proposes an explanation of what possible worlds are, and argues that this proposal, the interpreted models conception, should be attractive to anyone who thinks that modal facts are primitive, and so not to be explained in terms of some non-modal notio...

Karl Popper’s three worlds theory (3Wt) is a metaphysical theory that purports to provide an ordering of all entities in reality. This ordering is realized by the physical, mental and abstract status that entities possess. This status characterises the entities in world 1, world 2 en world 3, respectively. The ‘triadistic’ metaphysics of Popper forms an alternative for monistic and dualistic th...

A finite permutation group G on a linearly ordered set Ω is said to be a k-min-wise independent group, k-MWI for short, if Pr(minπ(X) = π(x)) = 1/|X| for every X ⊆ Ω such that |X| ≤ k and for every x ∈ X. We are concerned with the case of k-MWI groups for any linear order. Indeed, we prove that a permutation group G is k-MWI with respect to any linear order if and only if for every h ≤ k and fo...

Query specification for 3D object retrieval still relies on traditional interaction paradigms. The goal of our study was to identify the most natural methods to describe 3D objects, focusing on verbal and gestural expressions. Our case study uses LEGO R © blocks. We started by collecting a corpus involving ten pairs of subjects, in which one participant requests blocks for building a model from...

Interactive virtual worlds provide a powerful medium for experiential learning. Intelligent virtual agents can cohabit virtual worlds with people and facilitate such learning as guides, mentors, and teammates. This paper reviews the main pedagogical advantages of animated agents in virtual worlds, discusses two key research challenges, and outlines an ambitious new project addressing those chal...

With advances in computer hardware, 3D game worlds are becoming larger and more complex. Consequently the development of game worlds becomes increasingly time and resource intensive. This paper presents a framework for generation of entire virtual worlds using procedural generation. The approach is demonstrated with the example of a virtual city.