Design and Evaluations of Personal Agent-oriented Virtual Society

This thesis is concerned with the design, realization, and evaluation of a personal agent-oriented virtual society. A personal agent-oriented virtual society is a three dimensional audio-graphical computer-generated social environment which actively supports social collaboration between large numbers of distributed people. In recent years, the combination of communication networks and computer technologies has made it possible to create a cyberspace on the Internet. Recently, several 3D shared virtual spaces and worlds have been developed in which users can share the same experience in real time. The next important step is to extend these environments into a "virtual society". However, the majority of the previous studies have mainly focused on developing underlying systems for building multi-user distributed shared collaborative virtual environments. These studies have greatly contributed to the general work on the development of a virtual society. However a lot more needs to be done before we can come close to achieving this goal. To realize a virtual society, it is important to obtain a large number of people in a virtual world and experimentally evaluate its various functions/interfaces based upon the populated world. Only the Internet makes it possible to implement the world and evaluate it with a large number of people. For this purpose, we constructed a personal agent-oriemted virtual society called "PAW^2" (Personal Agent World) by usimg our distributed system called "CommumityPlace". PAW^2 is a 3D virtual society improved upon past virtual spaces based upon avatar and text communication by providing autonomous personal agents that support users plus a social/environmental infrastructure that allow social interactions in the environment. This thesis consists of three parts. The first part describes and evaluates the CommunityPlace system, a virtual reality-based distributed system for realizing 3D multi-user distributed shared collaborative virtual environments over the Internet. The second part describes the design policy of a virtual society, system architecture, and implementation of PAW^2 system and its initial evaluation. The third part focuses on user-oriented evaluations of the PAW^2 system from the followimg viewpoints: user activities and social activities taking place in PAW^2, and e-commerce system using PAW^2 as a market place. We evaluated the system populated by many people in the Internet. Finally, we introduce the notion of the next generation of a virtual society, i.e. a "self-sustaining" virtual society and discuss a possibility of realizing it. We could observe that initially most users were accessing PAW^2 simply to enjoy the service provided by the system but they have gradually organized the unique social/cultural phemomena and creative activities in PAW^2.報告番号: 乙15824 ; 学位授与年月日: 2003-12-12 ; 学位の種別: 論文博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 第15824号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科電気工学専