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  <b><i> Agents and Virtual Environments</i></b>
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<h2> Agents and graphical virtual environments</h2>
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<p><li> Michael Powers (<a
href="mailto:powers@petroglyph.com">powers@petroglyph.com</a>)
maintains web pages on <a
href="http://www.petroglyph.com/characters.html"> interactive
characters </a> and <a
href="http://www.petroglyph.com/community.html"> electronic
communities</a>.  The focus is mostly on applications to the arts and
entertainment -- "Interactivity is about relationship with authored
characters. Some of these characters have recognizable bodies that are
cel animated, photo-realistic, or rendered. Many others, such as the
structure of these Web pages do not have an easily recognizable "body"
yet they carry a relationship with a narrator-author, much like the
narrative voice of a novel. This experience is the mediation of a
relationship between author and participant through electronic
structures, some crude, others polished. The author or authoring group
always creates an interactive experience that engages the participant
in an emotionally laden activity - whether high drama or mechanistic
interaction. The potential to draw out a dramatic and entertaining
experience lies in the development of sophisticated interactive
engagement with responsive characters." <i>8/12/96</i>

<p><li> Sandia's <a
href="http://www.sandia.gov/vris/vris_homepage.html"> Virtual Reality/
Intelligent Simulation Laboratory</a> is using scriptable agents and
human controlled avatars in VR scenarios to train small team, close
quarters operations. Their interest is in training a person to handle
a specific situation or set of scenarios, rather than to perform a
given task. <i> 5/20/96 </i>


<p><li> The Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratory (<a
href="http://www.merl.com/svr.html"> MERL </a>) is focused on
exploring "social virtual reality", where the the emphasis is on the
interaction among people in virtual environments, rather than on
maximizing the perceptual realism of an individual experience using
special input and output devices.  "At MERL, we envision group
learning environments where people learn from each other and teachers,
and by interacting with computer simulations. We envision
collaborative work environments where people at different locations
interact with each other and shared, computer-simulated artifacts to
design a machine, plan a large-scale disaster relief effort, or
diagnose a complex equipment failure. We envision on-line play
environments where people participate in distributed games, historical
dramas, or create virtual microcosms for each other's entertainment."
See <a href="http://www.merl.com/comdex/white.html">Research on Social
Virtual Reality: Diamond Park and SPLINE</a> -- What's beyond
head-mounted displays and combat games?  <i> 5/20/96 </i>


<p><li> Agents as Avatars? <a
href="http://www.communities.com/habitat.html"> Habitats </a> are
graphical online communities populated by avatars.  <a
href="http://www.entertv.com/"> OnLive! Technologies </a> announced
the first commercial habitat which will support real-time voice
communications between multiple people in a "three-dimensional (3-D)
virtual world."  They say that "Multimedia PCs equipped with standard
modems and sound cards are all that is necessary to access 3-D voice
chat. Using the OnLive! Traveler, users will navigate through
communities of 3-D environments, represented by their own 3-D
"avatars," or on-screen personas, and talk with groups of other users
in real-time."  Traveler is based on the VRML standard.  <i> 1/5/96
</i>


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<h2> Agents and text-based virtual environments</h2>
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<p><li>


<p><li> Muds: <a
href="http://www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~student/susanj/agents/moobots.html">Bots
'n the MOO: Conversational Robots</a>, Susan Jacobson. <i> 5/18/96</i>

<p><li> <a
href="http://www.phil.uni-sb.de/projekte/HBKS/TightRope/issue.1/texte/doeben_eng.html">Knowbots
and Interactive Television</a> -- The Knowbotic-Interface-Project as
challenge to AI.  An abreviated version of a lecture, held within the
context of a workshop on "Interactive TV" at the Institute for New
Media, Frankfurt June 7, 1994 by by Dr. Gerd Döben-Henisch, Institute
for New Media, Frankfurt.  The task of the project is the automatic
translation of natural linguistic texts into images of a pictorial
world. This is made possible by using knowbots. Knowbots are
intelligent programs which can be "educated". They live in virtual
realities and are capable of accumulating knowledge about the world on
their own.  Relative to this knowledge, they are able to learn any
natural language. <i> 5/17/96 </i>


<p><li> <a href="http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/mlm/julia.html">Julia, a
Chatterbot</a>



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