A Realistic Chat Environment for Virtual Avatars in Cyber Space

Chat is a crucial function in current virtual worlds. Since virtual worlds are becoming increasingly popular, we need a realistic and efficient communication framework for multi-agents participating in a virtual world. This paper proposes a unified communication framework for multiple avatars in a virtual world, (e.g., Second-Life). Current chat systems in virtual worlds provide a set of special communi-cation protocols such as pairwise, group and secret chat, in-dependently. Therefore, modern virtual communication sys-tems have adapted artificial chat techniques such as ‘One-to-One Chat ’ and ‘Group Chat ’ to a virtual 3-D space. Our framework exploits spatial relationships (distance, and viewing vector) between several agents, without including a specialized chat protocol layer in communication. The main contribution of our work is threefold. First, we propose a realistic and unified communication framework which en-ables ‘Complete Chat ’ and ‘Partial Chat ’ in terms of spa-tial relationships between avatar agents without including an additional communication protocol. Second, we propose a single greedy algorithm to find an optimal position in 3-D virtual space which optimizes chat availability. Third, our system reconstructs a dialogue graph which maintains all transcripts in the form of directed graphs with tempo-ral(dialogue sequences) and spatial information(physical positions) about communicating agents. 1. Motivatio