Abstract not found

The majority of existing virtual heritage applications are focused on detailed 3D reconstruction of historically significant sites and ancient artifacts. Recreating the way of life of ancient people is only considered by some researchers, who employ crowd simulation for this task. Existing crowd simulation algorithms are not suitable for modeling complex individual behaviors and role dependent agent interactions with other participants in the Virtual World. To address this problem we suggest treating 3D Virtual Worlds as Normative Multiagent Systems and propose the Virtual Institutions Methodology to be used for design and deployment of Virtual Worlds that require complex interactions involving both humans and autonomous agents. To highlight the usefulness of this approach we illustrate how Virtual Institutions are employed in the development of the Uruk prototype, which integrates 3D Virtual Worlds and Artificial Intelligence in the domain of cultural heritage.

Abstract. This work outlines the research activities carried out by our groups in the direction of the implementation of a tool for sharing natural and cultural heritage on the web. The tool will serve as a support to teachers and people involved in scientific and cultural activities (for example, archaeologists, historians, geologists, directors of museums and of exhibitions) for making historical, naturalistic, artistic content available in a game-like but scientifically well founded way based on Virtual Institutions and intelligent software agents. Our approach is illustrated on the example of the city of Uruk, which is believed to be the first city on Earth, where the culture of ancient Sumerians is preserved in terms of the natural environment, human behaviour and architecture.

An important security aspect of Virtual Worlds (in particular Virtual Worlds oriented towards commercial activities) is controlling participants ’ adherence to the social norms (rules of behavior) and making them follow the acceptable interaction patterns. Rules of behavior in the physical world are usually enforced through a post factum punishment, while in computercontrolled environments like Virtual Worlds we can simply block the actions that are inconsistent with the rules and eliminate rule violations as such. In order to facilitate enforcing the rules in such automatic manner and allow for frequent rule changes, the rules have to be expressed in a formal way, so that the software can detect both the rules and the actions that can potentially violate them. In this chapter we introduce the concept of Virtual Institutions that are Virtual Worlds with normative regulation of interactions. For development of such systems we employ the Virtual Institutions Methodology that separates the development of Normative Virtual Worlds into two independent phases: formal specification of the institutional rules and design of the 3D interaction environment. The methodology is supplied with a set of graphical tools that support the development process on every level, from specification to deployment. The resulting system is capable of enforcing the social norms on the Virtual Worlds ’ participants and ensuring the validity of their interactions.