I-Room: Integrating Intelligent Agents and

Virtual Worlds

Introduction Application of a virtual space for Intelligent Interaction Provide support for formal business meetings, tutorial,

project meetings, discussion groups Used to organize and present pre-existing information as

well as displaying real-time information Communicate with participants, facilitate interactions,

record and action the decisions during the collaboration

I- Room concept within virtual worlds

Gives a collaboration an intuitive grounding in a persistent 3D space in which participants representation (avatars) appear.

Artifacts and resources used in the meeting are close at hand Avatars can meet each other face-to-face in a virtual world when

their human counterparts can’t Can be a effective alternative to face-to-face meetings, telephone

calls, or video conferences. Beyond these, I-Room can be used to deliver intelligent systems

support for meetings and collaborative activities.

Framework

I-Room is designed to draw on I-X Technology, which provides human participants with intelligent task support, process management, collaborative tools, and planning aids.

Can also utilize a range of manual and automated capabilities or agents in a coherent way.

Participants share meaning information about the processes or products they are working on.

Framework is flexible to provide participants in meetings with access to knowledge- based content

Intelligent Systems Technology Key intelligent system used in the I-Room is the I-X Technology

support framework and I-Plan. I-X is a suite of tools designed to aid in processes that create or

modify one or more “products” I-Plan is an intelligent planning aid Decision makers could use the I-X planning technologies when local

or remote from one another by interacting through a shared web interface.

However, the technologies lacked a simple and intuitive means to enable awareness of other decision-making agents presence or share artefacts.

After the advent of 3D Virtual Worlds With the advent of 3D virtual worlds (second Life, OpenSimulator),

they are able to link I-X Technologies so that they could support a community connected via such a virtual worlds meeting space.

Flexibility of scripting facilities in virtual worlds made the integration of intelligent systems relatively easy

Virtual worlds also supports good connections to web based static-media and dynamically generated web content.

This enabled voice, video, text chat, and presentation sharing across the virtual world.

I-X Technology and I-Room Meeting Support

This technology provides a user interface that acts as a sophisticated “to-do” list.

I-Room created within a virtual world linked to I-X Systems external to the virtual world to support collaborative meetings

It can support common requirements for meeting by

automatically generating a framework for meeting

keeping track of actions during the meeting

recording decisions

automatically generating an outline of the meeting minutes

I-Room can sense avatars presence and respond to commands through an object in virtual world called I-X helper.

I-Room can provide additional support by monitoring participants comings and goings in the meetings

prompting in-world “screens” to display the meeting agenda or any relevant images, media, documents, or webpages

unobtrusively documenting the meetings progress and outcomes.

Linking the I-Room to real-world knowledge-based systems can potentially extend the support they offer into this virtual space.

I-Room Capabilities

I-X helper Image Generator LED Display Media Controller Avatar Sensor Inventory Giver I-Room Questioner

Connecting an I-Room to a Virtual World

IX-helper, any convenient object in virtual world contains scripts to communicate with avatars

It communicates through one nominated IX-Agent to various IX-Services via a communication channel

Message from either end can be queued and sent later if both aren’t available

IX-helper can communicate with avatars via text channels in virtual world

Uses dedicated private channels to communicate with other devices such as screens

Provides a sensor for determining when avatars come into range In general, IX-helper lets participants with external I-X agents and

let those agents communicate with and control devices in the virtual world.

I-Room Applications

Emergency operations centers used for experimentation and exercise Support for geographically dispersed cross-disciplinary team engaged in

creating multimedia products Commercial application involving expertly tutored whisky-tasting and

sales Slam Games

Slam Games I-Room

Whisky I-Room

Thank You