I-Room: Creating a Room for Intelligent Interaction

Vision

I-Room is a room for intelligent interaction. It can be used for formal business meetings, tutorials, project meetings, discussion groups, informal gatherings, in short for any purpose where people go to interact.

Using Second Life for this kind of purpose is a powerful concept. Avatars can meet each other face-to-face in SL, when their human counterparts cannot. While meeting in SL is not the same as a real world meeting, some of the benefits are retained through immersion in the virtual world. In many cases, virtual world meetings are more effective than the real-world alternatives to face-to-face meetings, like teleconferences and videoconferences, because in SL, all the avatars in the meeting are in a similar situation.

To support intelligent interaction, the I-Room should provide the things that a good real-world meeting room would have:

• seats that are arranged so that participants can see each other and the spaces where information is displayed
• screens for displaying visual information (images, video, text, software demos)
• boards for public note-taking and displaying agenda etc.
• sound for streaming audio information (e.g. voice, music), which will also be the most effective form of communication between participants

• notify, remind, wait for, and welcome participants, log apologies
• provide access to information from previous meetings
• check previous actions
• keep a log of what is being said
• carry out votes
• keep track of agenda items
• send action requests to the responsible person
• gather supporting materials

While some of these tasks are simple, others can be performed well only if knowledge about meetings in general and the current meeting in particular is available to the I-Room. Linking the I-Room to existing, real-world knowledge-based systems can potentially make all their support available in SL.

Tools

• Display Screen: a screen that can be set up to be off or to show an area of the media texture assuming an nxm matrix
• Media Controller: to change media and audio streams in SL plots reliably for all types of land, and on group owned areas.
• Avatar Sensor: to give information on avatar's name, id, location, etc to external systems or maintain a model of who is present.
• Inventory Giver: to offer avatars in the I-Room items relating to the current events and processes in the I-Room. [Not yet provided]
• Chairperson's Chair: a chair in the meeting room that is designated for the chairperson - any avatar sitting there is expected to hold the role of the chair. [Not yet provided]
• I-Room Secretary: a note-taking, administrative facility that automatically covers some of the tasks a secretary would cover in a real-world meeting. [Limited version available]
• I-Room Questioner: to ask participants (multiple-choice) questions, letting them answer individually. This can be used, for example, to vote or to agree on a course of action. [Not yet provided]
• Link Helper: to talk to external knowledge-based systems and to reliably set up the communications link and pass back and forth requests, content, and reports, and to act as a chat conduit on need.
• Display Generator: a mechanism outside of SL to take screens from external applications, web accessible images (however generated) and content and to make an n x m matrix of the content to allow a single image to be used.
• Video mixing: A way to get that matrix single image/page into SL as part of the display so we can mix it with other real time content such as video cameras. One option is to use Wirecast desktop presenter on a web broswer window showing refreshed content as a web page.

Demonstrators

I-Demo-Meeting Room

• Set up a meeting
• Automatically add generic agenda items (e.g. previous actions, date of next meeting)
• Keep track of actions and agenda items
• Noting decisions and taking minutes
• Access minutes from previous meetings
• Carry or add actions for future meetings
• Automatic setup for the next meeting

• Monitor who is present at the meeting
• Use screens in-world to display the agenda or any other images relevant to the meeting
• Improved communication through immersion in the virtual world
• Use of voice to improve communication

The Scenario

There is a series of meetings related to a project, held at regular intervals (e.g. weekly). Each meeting has an agenda and a set of participants. One of the participants is the chair person, and there is a designated secretary. During the meeting, agenda items are discussed by the participants and minutes are taken by the secretary. There are generic agenda items that are part of every meeting (e.g. approve minutes of last meeting; set date for next meeting) and agenda items that are specific to a particular meeting. Actions may be assigned by the chair to participants and others. This is minuted automatically.

Although the demo has been developed in a way that is independent from virtual worlds, it is envisaged that the meeting is held in Second Life. The chair person of the meeting runs I-X and interacts with I-X during the meeting to access the meeting support available from I-X. Some of the support is also available directly from Second Life.

The demo is an internal progress meeting conforming to the SCRUM and SPRINT meetings of Agile method of software development (see Wikipedia SCRUM meeting). The meeting is the third in a project of developing an ocean game. In this meeting, the design of characters in the game and the game's development progress are to be discussed. Several images need to be compared and feedback for the artists is to be prepared.