DEMONSTRATION OF AN INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA ENVIRONMENT

The authors have implemented a prototype computer system that combines aspects of an on-line community with those of a virtual reality environment. They believe that interactive multimedia environments, and virtual reality environments in particular, can provide an immersive quality that lets users explore many new learning experiences. The prototype's purpose is to investigate the capabilities of current technology in this area and to develop future research directions. The system integrates a number of key technologies for supporting human collaboration and learning. To simulate today's collaborative activities, it uses a network architecture that lets multiple users at different locations interact in real time. In addition to human users, the prototype supports artificial agents. These agents can be collaborators in a computer-mediated task or characters in a virtual world visited by a user. Artificial agents increase the potential richness of an environment's interactive behavior. Unlike users in text-based on-line communities, users of the prototype communicate with each other and with artificial agents through speech. In addition to spoken interaction, the prototype includes audio rendering, hand-gesture recognition, and body-position-sensing technology. The images in this article show how users might experience such a virtual reality environment. The frames in the comic strip are taken (with some cropping) directly from a user display. A companion article in the Winter 1994 issue of IEEE MultiMedia describes how the authors implemented and combined the key technologies.