Download Itchy Feet & ICURA
The packages contain the Itchy Feet environment and/or
ICURA. Itchy Feet is a 3D Virtual World in the tourism domain
providing tourism specific services. ICURA is a 3D serious game
in which the player learns about Japanese culture and etiquette.
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i-Society paper, ICURA and the Semantic Search System
Posted on January 30th, 2010 No commentsThe work on the i-Society paper has been the main focus of Ingo during the last weeks. After he had received the reviews of the first draft, it took longer than usually planned to revise the paper and a new version could not be sent out until Wednesday of this week. While the paper had been perceived as being coherent and self-contained in general, some shortages were identified that mainly were centered around the presentation of the overall methodology. Due to time constraints not all of these comments could be integrated in the updated version, but according to the first reviews on this version, the paper seems to be ready for the submission. Ingo is now waiting for any additional comments until Sunday and will then submit the paper.
Besides the paper, Ingo has spent some time on the ICURA-Itchy Feet integration. The way users can enter ICURA from within the Itchy Feet world has been changed. While it was originally possible to enter ICURA from any position in the Itchy Feet world, Josef has added a temple to the Itchy Feet world which acts as the access point to the ICURA world. The user can now start ICURA from within the temple and when she returns to Itchy Feet, she is spawned in the temple.Mentioned ICURA, the development of the Serious Game is in its final stage. There are just some details to add before we can release a first version. In a meeting with his two supervisors, Josef planned his future work: the next thing will be to arrange and conduct an evaluation of the game and to search for an appropriate conference and write a paper for it. These tasks should be carried out until the end of April.
Markus carried on with the development of the Semantic Search System. Currently he is working on the Web GUI which is realized with the Google Web Toolkit and extGWT. The next big thing will be the fine tuning of the search algorithm and the development of the merging algorithm to merge results from the keyword search and the concept based search. Furthermore, the SwiftOWLIM Triplestore was enhanced so it is able to query for the incoming, outgoing and overall edges of a concept instance. For this purpose custom Serql predicates have been incorporated into the Serql query language.
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The Holidays
Posted on January 8th, 2010 No commentsThe last weeks were dominated by the Christmas holidays and the turn of the year. We all had been out of the office for some days and Markus is still on vacation. Nevertheless, some work has been going on in this time of which the essentials will be presented in the following.
Ingo has completed a first draft of the journal paper for the Human Computer Studies journal which has already been reviewed by some project member and is still under review by others. After sending out this draft at the end of the last year, Ingo’s focus in the new year has been on another paper project. We are going to send a paper on the methodology for developing applications in 3D Virtual Worlds to the i-Society conference. As the deadline is on the 31st of January, the time schedule is tight and Ingo has started by reviewing related methodologies in the domain of Virtual Environments. Based on the input from these research findings our methodology has been revised and Ingo is going to finish a first draft of the paper by the end of next week (shortly before he goes on a Berlin trip that weekend
). Hopefully, there will then be enough time for a second review cycle before the paper is submitted to the conference.Josef continued his work on the Serious Game ICURA. A big part of ICURA is already finished, what’s left are mostly issues concerning the game logic. For example, the player must not enter Shoji’s house and the area around it. This should prevent the player from simply walking to his house at the beginning of the game, talk to him and thus reach the end of the game. Otherwise we could spawn the avatar as soon as a specific task is fulfilled. It would be interesting to evaluate ICURA to see, if there is a significant learning success or not. We will see, if there is still enough time left to do so.