Anton Bogdanovych

Western Sydney University · School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics

In this paper we discuss building large scale virtual reality reconstructions of historical heritage sites and populating it with crowds of virtual agents. Such agents are capable of performing complex actions, while respecting the cultural and historical accuracy of agent behaviour. In many commercial video games such agents either have very limit...

The culture of Aboriginal Australians is unique and diverse, but, unfortunately, it is under threat of extinction. This is the culture that does not rely on written records, as knowledge is predominantly being shared in the form of oral tales and demonstrations. There are also many sensitivities associated with sharing knowledge with outsiders and...

Building large scale social simulations in virtual environments requires having a large number of virtual agents. Often we need to simulate hundreds or even thousands of individuals in order to have a realistic and believable simulation. One of the obvious desires of the developers of such simulations is to have a high degree of automation in regar...

3D Virtual Reality simulations of ancient societies represent a powerful mechanism for combining the knowledge of many researchers (e.g. archaeologists, historians and anthropologists) in a way that it becomes accessible to general audiences, as well as suitable for cross-disciplinary academic collaboration. Through such simulations people with lit...

In the virtual dreaming simulation [2] we show everyday life of Aboriginal people from the Darug tribe, who used to live in the Parramatta basin (New South Wales, Australia) in year 1770 A.D. before the arrival of the first fleet [3] and the establishment of the first European settlement in Australia. Each member of the tribe is represented by a vi...

Many modern virtual reality reconstructions of historical sites focus on buildings and artefacts, but often ignore the issue of portraying everyday life of the people who populated the reconstructed area. This is mainly due to high costs and complexity of populating such sites with virtual agents. Here we show how combining needs modelling and plan...

In this paper we investigate how teaching programming to the modern generation of students, “digital natives” who grew up with Google and Facebook and do not know the world before the Internet, can be improved through a highly visual game-like approach. Many programming teachers report that modern programming students have short attention span, lac...

In this paper we investigate the concept of believability and make an attempt to isolate individual characteristics (features) that contribute to making virtual characters believable. As the result of this investigation we have produced a formalisation of believability and based on this formalisation built a computational framework focused on simul...

A recent study supports the claim that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest continuous living culture on the planet, their being directly descended from the first people to leave Africa up to 75,000 years ago. Aborigines developed a rich culture involving custom, lore and value systems based on the sustainability of their spiritual connection, bel...

We are currently observing a paradigm shift in virtual reality and simulation technologies. From being predominantly entertainment focused, these technologies are now finding a much wider use in the so-called "serious games" space, where playing a game teaches the player some useful skills applicable in the physical world. While this trend is boomi...

Believability is an important characteristic of intelligent virtual agents, however, very few attempts have been made to define and formalise it. This paper provides a formal analysis of believability, focused on diverse aspects of believability of the agents and the virtual environment they populate, approaching the problem from the perspective of...

When conducting archaeological excavations of an-cient cities, 3D reconstruction has become an important mech-anism of documenting the findings and showing the results to general public in an accessible way. Most such reconstructions, however, mainly focus on visualising buildings and artefacts, while rarely simulating the actual people that popula...

Virtual reality reconstructions of ancient historical sites have become a valuable technique for popularising science and visualising expert knowledge to general audiences. Most such reconstructions only re-create buildings and artefacts and place them in the context of the virtual environment, but what is often missing in such simulations is the a...

3D virtual reality, including the current generation of multi-user virtual worlds, has had a long history of use in education and training, and it experienced a surge of renewed interest with the advent of Second Life in 2003. What followed shortly after were several years marked by considerable hype around the use of virtual worlds for teaching, l...

We present an approach for detecting, classi-fying and recognising novel non-verbal sounds on an Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot. Our method allows the robot to detect novel sounds, classify these sounds, and then recognise future instances. To learn the names of sounds, and whether each sound is relevant to the robot, a natural speech-based interacti...

Simulating large crowds of virtual agents has become an im- portant problem in virtual reality applications, video games, cinematography and training simulators. In this paper, we show how to achieve a high degree of appearance variation among individual 3D avatars in generated crowds through the use of genetic algorithms, while also manifesting un...

In this paper we present and evaluate a novel method for teleoperating a humanoid robot via a full-body motion capture suit. Our method does not use any a priori analytical or math- ematical modeling (e.g. forward or inverse kinematics) of the robot, and thus this ap- proach could be applied to the calibration of any human-robot pairing, regardless...

In this paper we show how 3D Virtual Worlds can be utilised for teaching ancient history. Our goal is to build an accurate replica of one of humanity’s first cities in a 3D Virtual World and provide history students with facilities to explore the virtual city and learn about its past in the simulated 3D environment. Unlike the majority of similar h...

Virtual worlds (VWs) continue to be used extensively in Australia and New Zealand higher education institutions although the tendency towards making unrealistic claims of efficacy and popularity appears to be over. Some educators at higher education institutions continue to use VWs in the same way as they have done in the past; others are exploring...

Research on embodied conversational agents' reason-ing and actions has mostly ignored the external en-vironment. This papers argues that believability of such agents is tightly connected with their ability to relate to the environment during a conversation. This ability, defined as awareness believability, is for-malised in terms of three component...

Over the past decade, teaching and learning in virtual worlds has been at the forefront of many higher education institutions around the world. The DEHub Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG) consisting of Australian and New Zealand higher education academics was formed in 2009. These educators are investigating the role that virtual worlds play in t...

The ambitious goal being pursued by researchers participat-ing in the RoboCup challenge is to develop a team of autonomous hu-manoid robots that is capable of winning against a team of human soccer players. An important step in this direction is to actively utilise human coaching to improve the skills of robots at both tactical and strategic levels...

Over the past decade, teaching and learning in virtual worlds has been at the forefront of many higher education institutions around the world. The DEHub Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG) consisting of Australian and New Zealand higher education academics was formed in 2009. These educators are investigating the role that virtual worlds play in t...

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,...

The Alps of southeastern France, better known as the Valley of Marvels, hide an impressive collection of engravings, mostly visible on the rocks around Mount Bego, which are irreplaceable witnesses of what life of the people who created them looked like. This calls for immediate action on promoting the awareness of this cultural treasure, which is...

We investigate an innovative design of information and communications technology for preservation and reenactment of cultures. Through an extensive literature review we identified the key components associated with a culture, among which are the environment, objects, knowledge, and institutions. Based on the acquired knowledge we developed a formal...

Many researchers associate a culture with some form of knowledge; other scholars stress the importance of the environment inhabited by the knowledge carriers; while archaeologists learn about cultures through the objects produced in the environment as a result of utilizing this knowledge. In our work we propose a model of virtual culture that prese...

The majority of existing virtual heritage applications are focused on detailed D 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 co...

This paper proposes a method to assess the cognitive state of a human embodied as an avatar inside a 3-dimensional virtual shop. In order to do so we analyze the trajectories of the avatar movements to classify them against the set of predefined prototypes. To perform the classification we use the trajectory comparison algorithm based on the combin...

Virtual Institutions are Virtual Worlds with normative reg- ulation of participants' interactions. This paradigm is based on normative multiagent systems and is technologically sup- ported by Electronic Institutions. In this paper we outline the prototype that illustrates the application of Electronic Institutions to the domain of Virtual Worlds. W...

Our research combines electronic institutions and 3D virtual worlds for the construction of virtual institutions which are virtual worlds with normative regulation of inter-actions. That is, a virtual world where participants actions have to comply with predefined institutional rules. In this context, the actions a participant may perform depend on...

Believability of computerised agents is a growing area of research. This paper is focused on one aspect of believability - believable movements of avatars in normative 3D Virtual Worlds called Virtual Institutions. It presents a method for implicit training of autonomous agents in order to â?believablyâ? represent humans in Virtual Institutions. Th...

The most popular two methods of extending the intelligence of virtual agents are explicit programming of the agents’ decision making apparatus and learning agent behaviors from humans or other agents. The major obstacles of the existing approaches are making the agent understand the environment it is situated in and interpreting the actions and goa...

Using 3D Virtual Worlds for commercial activities on the Web and the development of human-like sales as- sistants operating in such environments are ongoing trends of E-Commerce. The majority of the existing approaches oriented towards the development of such assistants are agent-based and are focused on explicit programming of the agents' decision...

The paper outlines a normative approach to the design of distributed applications that must consistently integrate a number of environments (i.e. form-based interfaces, 3D Virtual Worlds, physical world). The application of the described ideas is illustrated on the example of a fish market, which is an application that can simultaneously be accesse...

This thesis establishes Virtual Institutions as a comprehensive software engineering tech- nology for the development of 3D Virtual Worlds that require normative regulation of participants’ interactions (such as the commercially-oriented Virtual Worlds). 3D Virtual Worlds technology currently offers somewhat unregulated environments without means t...

Our society has evolved through the product economy and the service economy to the experience economy. Due to this fact the value of a travel product, nowadays, is far beyond the goods and services. Experiences are driving the travel industry and make the travel product more and more diverse. Moreover, not only the travel experience itself, but als...

This paper provides a brief overview of an implicit training method used for teaching autonomous agents to represent humans in 3D Virtual Worlds without any explicit training efforts being required.

Although rectangular dualization has been studied for several years in the context of ∞oorplanning problems, its descriptive power has not been fully exploited for graph representation. The main obstacle is that the computation of a rectangular dual of any planar biconnected graph requires a sequence of non-trivial steps, some of which are still un...

In this paper we propose viewing Virtual Worlds as open Multiagent Systems and propose the 3D Electronic Institutions method-ology for their development. 3D Electronic Institutions are Virtual Worlds with normative regulation of interactions. More precisely, the method-ology we propose here helps in separating the development of Virtual Worlds base...

In this paper we describe an e-Tourism environment that takes a community-driven approach to foster a lively society of travelers who exchange travel experiences, recommend tourism destinations or just listen to catch some interesting gossip. Moreover, business transactions such as booking a trip or getting assistance from travel advisors or commun...

In this paper we propose an algorithm for automatic transformation of a graph into a D Virtual World and its Euclidean map, using the rectangular dual- ization technique. The nodes of the initial graph are transformed into rooms, the connecting arcs between nodes determine which rooms have to be placed next to each other and define the positions of...

In this paper we propose viewing Virtual Worlds as open Multiagent Systems and propose the 3D Electronic Institutions method-ology for their development. 3D Electronic Institutions are Virtual Worlds with normative regulation of interactions. More precisely, the method-ology we propose here helps in separating the development of Virtual Worlds base...

In this paper we present the 3D Electronic Institutions meta- phor and show how it can be used for the specification of highly secure Virtual Worlds and how 3D Virtual Worlds can be automatically generated from this specification. To achieve the generation task we propose an algorithm for au- tomatic transformation of the Performative Structure gra...

In this paper we present an integrated, game-like e-Business environment that follows the role model of Massively Multi- User Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). The inter- face is realized as a D virtual world using affordable game engine technology. Our environment provides a platform for conducting business and it is supposed to be a community...

In this paper we present the findings of a study that aims at identifying the reasons that let many people still rely on traditional travel agents instead of booking their trips online. The prime motivation for investigating this issue is that it is impossible to have direct experience with the product prior to consumption in the domain of tourism....

Electronic Institution are regulated environments populated by autonomous software agents that perform tasks on behalf of users. Users, however, are reluctant in delegating full control of critical decisions to agents and prefer to make them on their own. In order to increase trust in agents we propose 3D Electronic Institutions as an environment i...

In this paper we propose the use of 3D Virtual Worlds for the visualization of Electronic Institutions. We show how D representation helps to open Electronic Institutions to human users and support co-learning between autonomous agents and humans.

The growing demand for shopping assistants in E-Commerce was identified by many researchers. Some retailers try to address this need by introducing totally autonomous agents; others make extensive use of human resources, shifting operators from telephone lines to chat-based interactions with online customers. The recently developed 3D Electronic In...

Many researchers have paid close attention in the recent past to 3D product presentation in E-Commerce systems. Surprisingly, not many practical results have been shown. In this paper we outline the reasons for the lack of success and propose the use of 3D Virtual Worlds that not only offer natural ways of product presentation but also provide mean...

In this paper we propose the use of Virtual Worlds as a 3D social interface for Electronic Institutions. It is shown how the two metaphors, Virtual Worlds and Electronic Institutions are combined into a single metaphor, 3D Electronic Institutions, while retaining the features and advantages of both. Its essence is to open Electronic Institutions to...

This work outlines the research activities carried out by our groups in the direction of the implementation of a tool for sharing nat-ural 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...

The use of 3D Virtual Worlds in the domain of cultural heritage represents a unique opportunity to accurately recreate historically significant sites as well as to provide a collaborative working envi-ronment for historians, archaeologists, designers and programmers. While most existing solutions are purely focused on reconstructing the architectur...