I-X Second Life Demonstration: Slam Games I-Room

Stephen Potter, AIAI, University of Edinburgh
Updated: Wed May 14 18:51:17 2008

The I-Room

This demonstration is based around one of a series of (fictional) virtual meetings at which those present discuss artwork. This meeting is held in Second Life, a 3-D virtual world in which avatars, in-world repesentations of people, can move around and engage various social activies in an environment that they themselves have, to a certain extent, created and fashioned. More specifically, the meeting is held in an I-Room, an intelligent collaborative space whose visual manifestion (in this case) comprises a designated area of the Second Life world containing objects intended to clearly represent their counterparts in a real life meeting area (seats, tables, screens, etc). It is into this area that the avatars (and, by extension, their 'owners') enter at the agreed time so as to participate in the virtual meeting. (For those with an avatar, the Slam I-Room can be visited at this location in Second Life.) For the purposes of this demonstration, we consider that the room specifically contains:

A ready-to-assemble kit containing a screen and I-X Helper Robot can be collected at this location in Second Life; assembly instructions can be found here.

Outside Second Life, the meeting is supported by I-X agents. I-X is a framework offering process support for collaborative and multi-agent systems; in this instance, the process is that of the meeting in question, and I-X is used by the chair of the meeting to provide and control the meeting agenda and the display of information, and to record and later document the minutes of the meeting and any decisions made. To do this, the chair uses a Process Panel, the primary human interface onto an I-X system. A second I-X agent, which runs autonomously, acts as a communications conduit into the I-Room in Second Life: it passes instructions from the chair's Process Panel to a specified object (an "I-X Helper Robot") in the I-Room, which then interprets them, and performs the appropriate action (which might be, say, to have a screen display a particular image).

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