Supporting presentation techniques based on virtual humans in educational virtual worlds

Educational virtual worlds (EVWs) allow one to circumvent physical, safety, and cost constraints that often affect real-world training and learning scenarios. Virtual humans can improve the effectiveness of an EVW e.g., by explaining and demonstrating to the user procedural tasks and communicating with learners in a natural way by exploiting both verbal and nonverbal communication. However, choosing how the learning material has to be presented to the learner and how to employ the virtual human is influenced by different factors, ranging from available technology (e.g., bandwidth, graphics hardware, installed software) to learner´s profile (e.g., physical and/or cognitive disabilities, spatial abilities, 2D/3D navigation expertise). The system we present in this paper flexibly supports different presentation techniques employing a virtual human into an EVW. The different capabilities of the system are illustrated, motivated and discussed