The impact of effective communication between users in 3D collaborative virtual environments : the conversational agent use case

Abstract

This paper aims to aid in the development of interactivity in virtual worlds, especially within the context of a virtual museum that serves the purpose of introducing its visitors to computing and basic electricity. We opted for the use of software agents with instructional and interactive purposes, which were personified as intelligent avatars serving as guides to a museum. This paper presents both a virtual 3D museum about the history of computing, developed using the OpenSimulator virtual worlds platform, where its 3D modeling and development tools were used with the help of scripts, as well as the focus of the project, which is the development of software agents. For the sake of achieving the objectives of this work, a research was conducted with a case study in order to verify whether the use of an intelligent agent in a virtual world can facilitate or support in the process of teaching and learning providing knowledge about the historical part of computing. The co nstruction of this environment, integrated with an intelligent agent named AGIMC (the portuguese acronym for Intelligent Agent of the Museum of Computing) used the public web server pandorabots. To verify the feasibility of using the environment, a case study was carried out, which demonstrated that the use of these environments does contribute as a mean to support teaching, but there are also some technological limitations that may hinder its practical use in the educational context. An assessment was carried out with IFRS (Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Sul). The results obtained during the evaluation with the students met our expectations, obtaining good results and indications that the agent did support the student’s conception of knowledge in the discipline introduction to computing, despite some difficulties found in its implementation.