Destruction and fragmentation of (semi-) natural habitats are considered the main causes of biodiversity loss worldwide. Plant species may exhibit a slow response to fragmentation, resulting in the development of an extinction debt in fragmented plant communities. The detection of extinction debt is of primary importance in habitat conservation strategies. We applied two different approaches pr...

Many complex systems can be represented as complex networks. Among them there has been much interest on community structure recently, and many studies focus attention on it, in particular community detection. While community detection can provide us much information, the community structure implies another feature, hierarchy of the system. Coarse-graining of complex networks can lead us to the ...

In order to populate virtual cities, it is necessary to specify the behaviour of dynamic entities such as pedestrians or car drivers. Since a complete mental model based on vision and image processing cannot be constructed in real time using purely geometrical information, higher levels of information are needed in a model of the virtual environment. For example, the autonomous actors of a virt...

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the level of academic stress caused by virtual education and its relationship with academic self-efficacy among students of Payame Noor universities in Yazd province. Methodology: This is a descriptive correlational study. The statistical population includes all students (boys and girls) in the fields of educational sciences, psychology and acc...

KEYWORDS Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), distributed virtual environments, multiuser environments. ABSTRACT VRML —the Virtual Reality Modeling Language— has already become the standard for the distribution of 3D virtual worlds on the Internet. Recently several enhancements have been made to extend it by behaviors, most of them altering the current standard radically. In this paper we ...

This paper presents new services for accessing, exploring and collaborating via the World Wide Web. These are based on the use of Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) technology which is used to create navigable 3-D graphical, textual, audio and video representations of the structure of the Web and also of its users. The paper describes a number of different services which address the issues...

As the nature of online gaming changes to accomodate vast, persistent virtual worlds, there is a growing need to populate them with inhabitants capable of dynamic, adaptable, fruitful interactions with players. In this paper we argue that by separately placing abstract compentencies in the agent and concrete domain knowledge in the environment, we can build simple intelligences that exhibit sop...

This paper introduces The Vertex Project, a school-based action research project currently underway at Middlesex University, which sets out to explore the educational applications of shared 3D virtual worlds. Working with three primary schools, the project aims to actively involve children in designing, constructing and populating their own virtual community on the Internet and, in doing so, wi...

In recent years there has been an explosion of virtual worlds intended for early childhood populations; however, because the majority of research on games and such worlds has focused on adults and adolescents, we know very little about these spaces. This article attempts to address this gap by providing a qualitative content analysis of the affordances that Webkinz World an online environment t...

Virtual reality is considered one of the fundamental directions, with computers and robotics, to reconfigure the global society in this century and even further, as one solution to overcome the current structural crisis, deep crisis with multiple consequences, most negative. This paper describes a possible involvement of virtual reality to shift from traditional engineering to virtual engineeri...