Introduction

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

 Use of intelligent virtual objects with an external module named iObject manager i)

to inform participants about activities evolution and ii) to decide whether

participants comply established norms.

 Design an object behaviour control scheme applicable to different VW (Virtual

World) platforms.

 Exploit the virtual nature of the spaces, and the objects populating these spaces,

allowing to represent things impossible for their real world counterparts.

The dynamic feature of current VW platforms only rely on users who are free to

dynamically change aspects of the virtual world by means of built-in tools and scripting

features. Our proposal is to extend the ability of a VW to dynamically change itself and

exploit the virtualness of the space supporting the presentation of information, which would

be impossible to do in the real world, and so provide a better support to participants on

their activities.

This chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 presents related work in areas related with

norms enforcement in virtual worlds and multiagent systems combined with virtual

environments. Section 3 describes how our system models activities taking place in

normative virtual worlds and uses intelligent objects to guide and control the user during

the activities. Section 4 presents the developed intelligent objects framework and finally

section 5 presents conclusions and future work.