A Realistic Chat Environment for Virtual Avatars in Cyber Space

Chat is a crucial function in current virtual worlds. Since virtual worlds are becoming increasingly popular, we need a realistic and efficient communication framework for multi-agents participating in a virtual world. This paper proposes a unified communication framework for multiple avatars in a virtual world, (e.g., second-life). Current chat systems in virtual worlds provide a set of special communication protocols such as pairwise, group and secret chat, independently. Therefore, modern virtual communication systems have adapted artificial chat techniques such as ´one-to-one chat´ and ´group chat´ to a virtual 3-D space. Our framework exploits spatial relationships (distance, and viewing vector) between several agents, without including a specialized chat protocol layer in communication. The main contribution of our work is threefold. First, we propose a realistic and unified communication framework which enables ´complete chat´ and ´partial chat´ in terms of spatial relationships between avatar agents without including an additional communication protocol. Second, we propose a single greedy algorithm to find an optimal position in 3-D virtual space which optimizes chat availability. Third, our system reconstructs a dialogue graph which maintains all transcripts in the form of directed graphs with temporal (dialogue sequences) and spatial information (physical positions) about communicating agents.