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Archaeological excavations provide us with important clues about the past. Excavated artefacts represent an important connection to civilisations that no longer exist and help us understand some of their customs, traditions and common practices. With the help of academics and practitioners from various disciplines, the results of archaeological excavations can be analysed and a body of knowledge about the corresponding society can be created and shared with members of the general public. Museums have traditionally served the purpose of communicating this knowledge and backing it up with the help of the excavated artefacts. Many museum visitors, however, find it difficult to develop a coherent understanding of the corresponding society only based on the artefacts and annotations shown in museums. Effective modern techniques that have high potential in helping museum visitors with better understanding of the past are 3D reconstruction and virtual reality. 3D reconstruction offers a cost-effective way of recreating historical settlements in a computer-generated virtual environment, while virtual reality helps with immersing people into such environments and reaching a high degree of realism. With the help of these technologies, it becomes possible to relive history, imagine yourself being a part of the reconstructed society and learn about its culture firsthand. The combination of 3D reconstruction and virtual reality represents a very powerful learning tool; however, this tool has been rarely used in a museum setting and its correct use has not been properly investigated. In this paper, we present a study into using virtual reality in itinerant archaeological exhibitions. We discuss the lessons we have learned from developing an interactive virtual reality simulation of the Neolithic settlement of La Draga. These lessons feature our analysis of qualitative and quantitative feedback of museum visitors, as well as what we have learned from analysing their navigation and interaction patterns.

The goal of this research is to provide linguists with visualisations for analysing the results of their hate speechannotation. These visualisations consist of a set of interactive graphs for analysing the global distribution ofannotated messages, finding relationships between features, and detecting inconsistencies in the annotation.We used a corpus that includes 1,262 comments posted in response to different Spanish online new articles.The comments were annotated with features such as sarcasm, mockery, insult, improper language, construc-tivity and argumentation, as well as with level of toxicity (’not-toxic’, ’mildly toxic’, ’toxic’ or ’very toxic’).We evaluated the selected visualisations with users to assess the graphs’ comprehensibility, interpretabilityand attractiveness. One of the lessons learned from the study is the usefulness of mixed visualisations that in-clude simple graphs (Bar, Heat map) - to facilitate the familiarisation with the results of the annotated corpustogether with more complex ones (Sankey, Spider or Chord) - to explore and identify relationships betweenfeatures and to find inconsistencies.

This research proposes a digital Cultural Probe (CP) for children in the context of energy use and awareness. A CP is a user research method that allows participants to self-report by means of tools, artefacts, and tasks that they complete at their own pace. Our CP aims to gather data about the energy related habits and knowledge of the children and their families and also aims to provoke reflection and raise their awareness of energy and environmental issues. It is well known that the main drawback of CPs is their low completion rate and the consequent lack of gathered data. Based on the impact of gamification on users’ motivation and engagement, we aim to test the hypothesis that ”Gamification may encourage an active and fruitful participation of children in Cultural Probes”. CP consists of four tasks designed to gather information about the children and their families’ electric consumption and saving habits. We developed the CP as an Android app which was evaluated with children from two primary schools in Barcelona, who interacted with two different app versions (gamified and non-gamified). We designed a comparative experiment that gathered data on CP completion rate, CP task completion rate, and the time required to complete the CP. To our surprise, we found a slight difference in favour of the non-gamified app in all of these measures, though this difference was not statistically significant. However, the difference in the children’s awareness of and attitude to energy consumption before and after the realisation of the CP was significant as measured by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. This was not the case for the effect on energy awareness of the children’s relatives. The lessons we learned, which may also prove to be useful for researchers that aim to design cultural probes, are that user research methods for children can be effective enough when designed to be interactive and dynamic (i.e. digital CPs) and that the number of CP tasks may also be a factor to take into account. When the number of tasks is low, the CP is likely to achieve a high completion rate and the additional effort of gamifying the application may be not worthwhile. Then, gamification may support a CP with a large number of tedious tasks. When designers want children to reflect on key issues, the CP should be thoughtfully designed because it is not easy to foster children’s reflection and reasoning.

[EN] This paper presents two gamification experiences developed in the Computer Science (CS) degree at the University of Barcelona. Usually, the CS degree suffers from low class attendance, which impacts the participation of students in in-class programming activities. Additionally, this degree includes a basic course related to human computer interaction that, despite of being valuable for the formation of students, they feel as boring and useless, far from their - heavily computer focused - interests. Then we decided to gamify a basic course of programming skills and the mentioned HCI course. We decided to use two different formats, online and physical. First, one experience was performed in “Human Factors in Computing” course of third year of studies, with 70 enrolled students. First, students attended to a 3D online theoretical class related to emotional design in “The education district” (TED) platform, which is a 3D Virtual World (VW) for educational purposes, developed by Virtway corporation. Afterwards, they participated in the ‘Game of thrones’ gamified activity where they evaluated the usability of TED. Second, we designed ‘physical’ gamified classes to increase attendance to Data Structures course, and in consequence, augment the number of programming exercises that students perform and the assistance they receive from the teacher. During the gamified sessions, the 120 enrolled students enhanced their skills in solving programming problems. The experience consisted of three kinds of challenges (with easy, medium, and hard difficulty level) solved in large, medium, and low-sized groups of students, respectively. The results of both experiences were satisfactory as evidenced by the percentage of students (>=66,7%) that rated the activities between 6 and 10 (in a 0 to 10 scale)., Thanks to Virtway team, I. Dieste and M. Rodilla, and projects 2017-SGR-341, MISMISLanguage (PGC2018-096212-B-C33) and Accio COMRDI18-1-0010.

Within the area of intelligent User Interfaces, we propose what we call Sentient Embodied Conversational Agents (SECAs): virtual characters able to engage users in complex conversations and to incorporate sentient capabilities similar to the ones humans have. This paper introduces SECAs together with their architecture and a publicly available software library that facilitates their inclusion in applications –such as educational and elder-care– requiring proactive and sensitive agent behaviours. In fact, we illustrate our proposal with a virtual tutor embedded in an educational application for children. The evaluation was performed in two stages: firstly, we tested a version with basic textual processing capabilities; and secondly, we evaluated a SECA with Machine-Learning-enhanced user understanding capabilities. The results show a significant improvement in users’ perception of the agent’s understanding capability. Indeed, the Response Error Rate decreased from 22.31% to 11.46% using ML techniques. Moreover, 99.33% of the participants consider the global experience of talking with the virtual tutor with sentient capabilities to be satisfactory.

During the last years, gamification has been used to engage students in more attractive educational activities in different Computer Science subjects at the university level, thereby improving their motivation and learning outcomes. This work continues a research that initially proposed a gamified design for the course “Distributed Artificial Intelligence”, an optional undergraduate course of the Computer Engineering degree. Specifically, we focused on reinforcing subjects related to Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) by means of fun hands-on activities to experiment theoretical concepts in practice. A first iteration of the design was deployed during two consecutive academic years, with good results in terms of students’ perceived learning, engagement and commitment during the class. Nevertheless, a posterior analysis of the design showed that the proposed mechanics did not consider some types of players - such as disruptors -, and some of the learning profiles - such as theoretical and reflexive -. Then, we proposed a card-based game to redesign the learning experience, using a LEarner-centered GAmification Design Framework (LEGA) that aligns both educational and gamification approaches. This paper focuses on this second iteration of the design, which has been deployed and evaluated during the last semester. The obtained results show that students liked the card game, were engaged and motivated during the gamified class, as well as they perceived an increased learning in the subject.

A three-dimensional (3-D) virtual world (VW) facilitates users? interactions as they immerse and engage themselves in a shared virtual space. This type of interface may be especially useful when consumers utilize home electronics for accessing personalized online services. Previous research has focused on a collaborative conversational recommender (CCR) framework, in which a synchronous online 3-D interface for multiple consumers integrates with a recommender. In this article, a state-based model of user-recommender interaction that allows users to move from different states of interaction (i.e., individual and collaborative) among users, is defined. It is then evaluated by users and compared with an individual approach. The results from this research demonstrate that the collaborative capacities proposed in the framework improve user experience and significantly increase the performance of the recommendation process, i.e., users take less time in achieving the desired service.

Hybrid structured 3D Virtual Environments model serious activities in immersive 3D spaces, where participants are human and software agents, and their interactions are regulated by an Organization Centered Multi-Agent System OCMAS. In this context, both OCMAS social model and the tasks that users need to accomplish can be rather complex, and thus, users may benefit from having an assistance service. Hence, we propose personal assistant agents PA, which, based on knowledge about the OCMAS specification and current system state, provide the user with an advice a plan to achieve her or his goal. Additionally, we implement this service with PLAN-EA, an Extension of the A* algorithm that generates plans for a user whose actions may depend on other users' actions. Thus, PAs provide plans that do not only include assisted user actions but also other users' ones. We illustrate our approach by means of v-mWater-an online water market-and make a comparative analysis, with and without assistance, where efficiency-in terms of number of user actions-shows an improvement 7 vs 10.8, efficacy-percentage of completed tasks-also improves 93% vs 77%, and assistance's overall satisfaction is positive. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper proposes a gamification design of a Cultural Probes (CP) in the context of the Smart Grid. CP is a well-known HCI technique used to inform and inspire applications design. Gamification aims to enhance the participation of users in CP tasks. Participants are children who develop tasks to provide designers with information about families' habits of energy consumption, and their knowledge and interest in energy related issues. We use a narrative that engages the player in the mission of saving people wasting energy crazily, under the influence of an evil wizard.

The educational game development is a multidisciplinary software engineering process, where participate instructional and game designers, artists and programmers. Nevertheless, educators, who have an important role in the process, have limitations in authoring games at any moment to adapt them according to key educational aspects such as intended learning outcomes and their metrics, students’ learning styles, teaching and learning activities and embedded assessment. We propose a conceptual domain model that supports the development process of educational game authoring tools taking into account both educational and game domains. We consider authoring in two domains. In the educational domain, teachers configure/modify either generic activities with any curricular content, or specific learning activities with a concrete one. In the game domain teachers configure/modify game elements and challenges. Finally, we present two educational game authoring tools in the domain of maths supported by the proposed conceptual model.

In the recent years, the gamification of learning has emerged to include game-based thinking and game mechanics within the classroom, serving the purpose of motivating and engaging students during the process of learning. Gamifying is not a trivial task for educators. Although gamification frameworks can guide them during the process, they usually do not focus on educational aspects such as intended learning outcomes (ILOs), learning styles (LS), learning activities (LAs) and learning mechanics (LMs), neither take into account the two roles of students - as players and learners. This paper aligns both educational and gamification worlds and proposes a Learner-Centered Framework for the design of gamified learning activities. It provides a guide for teachers that allows them to start with ILOs and LAs, and reach suitable gamified learning mechanics to be implemented in the process of gamification.

This paper presents the design, development and analysis of a game for computer literacy. Specifically, the game addresses educational objectives included in the curriculum of non-technological careers, such as the identification and analysis of concepts related to basic hardware components of a computer. These objectives are joined with those of a video game, i.e., live an attractive, motivating and enriching experience. The game has focused on the interaction between the player, who plays the role of a student, a 3D virtual computer, and a character who plays the role of the teacher. The player interacts with the computer and answers a series of inquiries posed by the teacher, all related to components of the 3D computer located in the game scenario, which represents the teacher's office. For each correct answer, the player receives a sounded feedback and messages of encouragement from the teacher, as well as points. Once the player completes each level, the result is stored and can be displayed in a scoreboard. Game analysis has been done using the so-named LM-GM framework, which is an analytical model proposed by GaLA (Game and Learning Alliance, the European Network of Excellence on Serious Games), that maps learning mechanics (LM) to game mechanics (GM). The results of the analysis indicate that the serious game seemly integrates learning objectives as well as LM and GM.

In this paper, we present a generic interaction framework that controls intelligent objects' actions in different virtual world (VW) platforms. These actions are based on the state of external platform-independent artificial intelligence-based systems such as multi-agent and rule-based systems. We have evaluated the proposed framework by means of two intelligent objects, a door and a noticeboard, incorporating them in Second Life and OpenWonderland VWs. These objects allow to work along three advanced aspects of a serious virtual environment: it is a dynamic space where participants are synchronously informed about activities evolution inside the virtual space, it can integrate processes and information coming from the real world, and it needs norms to organize participants actions, to define actions consequences, and to prevent undesired participants behaviors. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Traditional theory classroom dynamics suffer from student feedback and interaction. Unfortunately, attendance rates also represent a common problem. In order to mitigate these issues, we propose the inclusion of novel teaching resources. On the one hand, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) core concepts of distribution, autonomy and interaction can be mapped into collaborative classes, where students can experience theoretical concepts in hands-on activities. On the other hand, class gamification can help to enhance students motivation and engagement. Nevertheless, applying gamification requires the usage of a suitable framework. This paper proposes an extension of the Gamification Model Canvas. This extension includes MAS principles as well as those of Lego Serious Play and Audience Response Systems. Additionally, we illustrate its applicability by means of a case study that designs and gamifies a multi-agent systems class, which has been positively evaluated by students.

Nowadays, gamification, or the use of game elements in serious activities, is applied to enhance engagement and to improve user’s outcomes. On another note, the teaching of core concepts about Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) - such as distribution, autonomy, and interaction - is mostly performed by means of traditional theory classroom dynamics. Our claim is that MAS theory classes could be enhanced with gamified activities so that students can experience theoretical concepts in fun hands-on activities. Nevertheless, the design of the gamified classes requires the support of a suitable Gamification Design Framework (GDF) oriented to learning. This work analyses different GDFs and proposes an extension of one of the most widely used. This extension provides further support because it considers social computing in education when proposing an additional design stage along with alternative technologies such as ARS (Audience Response Systems) and LSP (Lego Serious Play). Furthermore, we illustrate its applicability by means of a case study of gamified activities in a multi-agent systems classroom.

3D eCommerce spaces may often be highly populated spaces, with a huge number of users, areas and selling products. Therefore, their design should address different strategies to guide and assist users to locate and to be aware of the most interesting areas, products or users in there. In this paper, we present an approach to enhance and facilitate user buying experience in a large 3D eCommerce space. Specifically, we propose a collaborative recommendation framework which incorporates three types of interactive objects --the User Registration Object (URO), the Interactive Map Object (IMO), and the Recommendation Object (RO)-- to guide users along the whole buying experience.

Nowadays e-commerce websites offer users such a huge amount of products, which far from facilitating the buying process, actually make it more difficult. Hence, recommenders, which learn from users’ preferences, are consolidating as valuable instruments to enhance the buying process in the 2D Web. Indeed, 3D virtual environments are an alternative interface for recommenders. They provide the user with an immersive 3D social experience, enabling a richer visualisation and increasing the interaction possibilities with other users and with the recommender. In this paper, we focus on a novel framework to tightly integrate interactive recommendation systems in a 3D virtual environment. Specifically, we propose to integrate a Collaborative Conversational Recommender (CCR) in a 3D social virtual world. Our CCR Framework defines three layers: the user interaction layer (3D Collaborative Space Client), the communication layer (3D Collaborative Space Server), and the recommendation layer (Collaborative Conversational Recommender). Additionally, we evaluate the framework based on several usability criteria such as learnability, perceived efficiency and effectiveness. Results demonstrate that users positively valued the experience.

© 2003-2012 IEEE. Structured Hybrid 3D Virtual Environments are 3D virtual spaces where staff (organisational) software agents support human users in their task achievement. These systems are characterized by: i) being hybrid, so that humans and software agents can interact; and ii) being structured and task oriented, so that interactions are regulated by a subjacent Organisation Centered Multi Agent System (OCMAS) -an Electronic Institution (EI). The contribution of this paper is to include task-oriented conversational staff bots (i.e. the embodiment of staff agents in the 3D environment) that communicate with users by using natural language. With this aim, we extend the Artificial Intelligence Mark-up Language (AIML) with special tags to enable complex task-oriented conversations whose flow needs to consider both the states of the conversation and the ontology related to the task. We evaluate the usability of our conversational proposal and compare it to a previous command-based interaction system. Results show the conversational approach presents a higher user satisfaction than the command-based one. Moreover, in average, it also performs better in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and errors.

Coordination infrastructures play a central role in the engineering of multiagent systems. Since the advent of agent technology, research on coordination infrastructures has produced a significant number of infrastructures with varying features. In this paper, we review the the state-of-the-art coordination infrastructures with the purpose of identifying open research challenges that next generation coordination infrastructures should address. Our analysis concludes that next generation coordination infrastructures must address a number of challenges: (i) to become socially aware, by facilitating human interaction within a MAS; (ii) to assist agents in their decision making by providing decision support that helps them reduce the scope of reasoning and facilitates the achievement of their goals; and (iii) to increase openness to support on-line, fully decentralised design and execution. Furthermore, we identify some promising approaches in the literature, together with the research issues worth investigating, to cope with such challenges. © Cambridge University Press, 2015., The work presented in this paper has been partially funded by projects EVE (TIN2009-14702-C02-01), AT (CSD2007-0022), and the Generalitat of Catalunya grant 2009-SGR-1434

Nowadays e-commerce websites offer users such a huge amount of products, which far from facilitating the buying process, actually make it more difficult. Hence, recommenders, which learn from users' preferences, are consolidating as valuable instruments to enhance the buying process in the 2D Web. Indeed, 3D virtual environments are an alternative interface for recommenders. They provide the user with an immersive 3D social experience, enabling a richer visualisation and increasing the interaction possibilities with other users and with the recommender. In this paper, we focus on a novel framework to tightly integrate interactive recommendation systems in a 3D virtual environment. Additionally, we evaluate the framework based on several usability criteria. Results demonstrate that users positively valued the experience.

Structured 3D Virtual Environments are 3D virtual spaces where some users' interactions are regulated by a subjacent Organisation Centered Multi Agent System (OCMAS) ---an Electronic Institution (EI). They are task-oriented hybrid systems, where staff (organisational) software agents support --based on activities' specification and current EI state--human users in their task achievement. The contribution of this paper is a conversational task-oriented structured 3D environment, where users interact with staff bots (i.e. the embodiment of staff agents) using natural language and, as a result, the communication is improved. With this aim, we extend the Artificial Intelligence Mark-up Language (AIML) with special tags to enable the complex flow of task-oriented conversations. They are characterised by different conversation' states --such as asked, responded, failed or confirmed--and by data types from the EI ontology. We evaluate the usability of our conversational proposal and compare it to a previous command-based interaction system. As expected, data analysis on users' skills --command-based novice vs expert profile-- suggests the co-existence both conversational and command-based user-agent interaction styles. But overall, results show a higher users' satisfaction with the conversational approach which, in average, also performs better in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and errors., Work funded by Spanish CSD2007-0022, TIN2011-24220 and TIN2012-38876-C02-02 research project

Virtual Institutions (VIs) have proven to be adequate to engineer applications where participants can be humans and software agents. VIs combine Electronic Institutions (EIs) and 3D Virtual Worlds (VWs). In this context, Electronic Institutions are used to establish the regulations that structure interactions and support software agent participation while Virtual Worlds facilitate human participation. In this paper we propose Virtual Institution eXEcution Environment (VIXEE) as an innovative communication infrastructure for VIs. Using VIXEE to connect Virtual Worlds and EI opens EI to humans, providing a fully operational and comprehensive environment. The main features of the infrastructure are (i) the causal connection between Virtual Worlds and Electronic Institutions, (ii) the automatic generation and update of the VIs' 3D visualization and (iii) the simultaneous participation of users from different virtual world platforms. We illustrate the execution of VIXEE system in a simple eAuction house example and use this example to evaluate the performance of our solution. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Simulating large crowds of virtual agents has become an important 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 unique characteristic features of a given population group. We show how virtual cities can be populated with diverse crowds of virtual agents that preserve their ethnic features, illustrate how our approach can be used to simulate full body avatar appearance, present a case study and analyze our results.

Given that SmartGrids focus on the demand-side and are predicated on consumer participation, we propose an innovative user-infrastructure interface for SmartGrids, in which information visualisation for comparative feedback and new affordances for the Smart Meter are integrated within a virtual environment for a Serious Game. Moreover, in the context of a micro-Grid, we seek to encapsulate aspects of self-organisation and support the principles of enduring institutions through the same interface. We give an example to explain how some of the activities (rooms in the virtual environment) can be structured within the context of an electronic institution. In this way, we aim to use the Smart Meter to promote `assistive awareness', not just for consumer participation, but also for other aspects of user engagement with critical infrastructure, for example as a citizen, as a stakeholder, and as a practitioner.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are online videogames played at the same time by a huge number of players experiencing together the same virtual world. MMOGs are an important focus of research, not only because they are economically attractive, but also because a MMOG involves many technologies (3D graphics, networking, AI) and a large amount of data that is generated by the interactions of many individuals in an inherently distributed scenario, forming a complex problem. Previous work in this line of research introduced the architecture called the "Massively Multiplayer Online Games based on Multi-Agent Systems", an effort to develop a system to design, and later deploy, MMOGs using agent technologies. In this paper, we present the model and method behind this architecture, paying special attention to the definition and design of the "Game Zones", the representation of the virtual environment. Also, we detail the components and steps to follow in the design of MMOGs based on organizations.

Shape grammars play an important role in a new generation of tools for the analysis and design of products. Up until now there has been numerous attempts to create a general shape grammar interpreter, but most of the existing tools are either very specific in their purpose, have only limited functionality or were programmed for one operating system. In this work, we present a tool named Shape Grammar Interpreter (SGI) for the automatic generation of designs. The developed shape grammar framework allows designers to automatically synthetize designs and to actively participate in the generation process. Great effort has been devoted to provide an interactive way of defining shapes and later using them in shape grammar rules and designs' generation process. The tool implements two different types of algorithms for the generation of designs. First, Tree-search algorithms which store the state of the generation process in a tree structure and uses traditional tree-search algorithms to find the next rule to apply. Second, and most importantly, an optimized subshape detection algorithm. Hence, subshapes of the existing shapes can be detected and used in the generation process obtaining not only a wider set of designs but potentially more appealing ones. In this paper, we also describe the architecture of the framework and provide a performance evaluation of proposed algorithms, showing a significant gain in performance. Potential applications of our research can be found in the educational field (i.e. architecture and arts) and in the automatic generation of architectural, mechanical and product designs. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Since its beginning, web technology has advanced from a text-based to a visual-based interaction. This evolution has been facilitated by both high speed internet connections and PC's graphical power. Virtual world (VW) technology began as standalone applications (e.g.. virtual simulations) but soon evolved into web-based applications. Nowadays, home users for entertainment and wide-spread enterprises or institutions for business can exploit virtual worlds to develop remote activities between friends, employees, clients, teachers or students (Sherman, 2002). Then, virtual worlds have clear applications in e-governance, elearning and e-commerce, and therefore it is mandatory to study mechanisms ensuring the assistance and the control of activities taking place in these applications. We focus on social virtual worlds populated by participants that act in order to achieve common and individual goals (Bartle, 2003). Due to the type of activities taking place in a Social Virtual World (SVW), the virtual environment should be prepared to be a dynamic space where participants are informed about activities' evolution and where norms are used to organize participants' actions, to define actions' consequences and to prevent undesired participants behaviours. We rely on electronic institutions (Esteva, 2003) to set up participants' valid interactions and on virtual objects, named intelligent objects, populating the virtual world, to enforce norms and to give assistance to participants (Rodriguez, 2008). This work exploits the Virtual Institution (VI) concept which is a combination of both multiagent and virtual world technologies (Bogdanovych, 2007). We have designed a general framework of object behaviour control tied with an IA based external module and prepared to be exploited by several virtual world platforms. This is done creating a specific module to capture participant interactions on objects populating the virtual world and connecting this module with an external and generic one in charge of deciding what should be the virtual object action. Decision depends on an organizationbased multiagent system (MAS) which, as said before, establishes the valid interactions participants may have and the consequences of those interactions. Our main objectives are:  Establish participants' roles, activities and norms by means of a multiagent system named electronic institution. Participants can be both software agents and humans. Controlling and Assisting Activities in Social Virtual Worlds 13

11 páginas, 11 figuras.-- El PDF es la versión manuscrita de autor., Hybrid systems such as those that combine 3D virtual worlds and organization based multiagent systems add new visual and communication features for multiuser applications. The design of such hybrid and dynamic systems is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a system that can automatically generate a 3D virtual world (VW) from an organization based multiagent system (MAS) specification that establishes the activities participants can engage on. Both shape grammar and virtual world paradigms inspired us to propose a Virtual World Grammar (VWG) to support the generation process of a virtual world design. A VWG includes semantic information about both MAS specification and shape grammar elements. This information, along with heuristics and validations, guides the VW generation producing functional designs. To support the definition and execution of a Virtual World Grammar, we have developed a so named Virtual World Builder Toolkit (VWBT). We illustrate this process by generating a 3D visualization of a virtual institution from its specification., This work is partially funded by EVE (TIN2009-14702-C02-01/TIN2009-14702-C02-02) and AT (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022) projects, EU-FEDER funds, the Catalan Gov. (Grant 2005-SGR-00093), and Marc Esteva’s Ramon y Cajal contract.

Our research combines electronic institutions and 3D virtual worlds for the construction of virtual institutions which are virtual worlds with normative regulation of interactions. 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 the institutional rules and the current execution state. We propose to include iObjects, intelligent objects, as entities having both visualization properties and decision mechanisms in the virtual institution. They are a new key element to improve users participation in virtual institutions. We situate them in a middleware infrastructure in order to be independent of 3D virtual world platform and to provide a general solution in which participants could be connected from different immersive environment platforms.

We present a model to predict and represent human fatigue in a 3D interactive system. A fatigue model has been developed for the fatigue assessment of several joints of the human body within the static case hypothesis. The model incorporates normalized torques, joint strength and maximum holding time as parameters. Fatigue evolution is predicted taking into account how these variables evolve over time. The fatigue model is embedded within an Inverse Kinematics engine that tries to achieve user-defined goals. During the animation, the predicted fatigue level is given to the graphical system in order to visualize it around its associated joint. The current fatigue value is exploited by the fatigue model to perform a new iteration towards the goal. The traditional joint model is broken down into two half-joints that better represents the anatomic organization of motion production through two independent muscle groups. Based on this organization, we can calculate and visualize independent fatigue variables for each antagonist muscle group. This type of visualization gives an intuitive and clear feedback. Each half-joint maintains its own fatigue model and variable. The two fatigue variables are represented by means of dynamic semicircles. Visual guides as semicircle's length and gradual color indicates fatigue evolution along time

Human reaching in a 3D environment is an interesting matter of research due to its application to workplace or vehicle-interior design. We introduce a 3D environment where a virtual human performs reaching tasks over 3D objects in the world. This environment also provides tools to generate and visualize reachable volumes. Reachable spaces are approximated using adjacent box-shaped voxels. We define several strategies in order to model different types of reaching, and we employ our system to construct and analyze reachable spaces for these strategies. In general, different strategies do have reachable spaces that share a common region of intersection. Therefore, goals exists that can be reached using two or more strategies. For those goals, a high-level layer is responsible for selecting the most appropriate given a certain reaching task. As a practical application, this paper presents a comparison of two usual strategies to model standing and seated reaching. The generated reach spaces show that, for each of them, a strategy is clearly more adequate than the other.

The design and development of a visual computer system for the modelling and simulation of human movements are described. A multimedia language named HAL (Human Animation Language) allows human figure movements to be generated in a graphical and intuitive way, accomplishing human-computer interaction through a 3D icon-graphic interface. In the language implementation, the object-oriented programming methodology is used. In order to validate the proposed language, a specific development environment, named "choreographic creation", has been designed. A PC system has been considered in order to provide better user accessibility.