Modelling activities in a social virtual world

Our approach: a hybrid system with software agents and humans in 3D virtual

Worlds

Conventional virtual communities are populated by avatars representing human

participants connected to the virtual world. We focus on a hybrid approach due to the

heterogeneous nature of participants as they can be software agents and humans. Our

system is based on Bogdanovych approach which utilizes this hybrid nature of participants

in the so named Virtual Institutions (Bogdanovych, 2007) (Bogdanovych et al., 2008).

Despite of the hybrid system complexity, it has advantatges as the human participant

controls its avatar in a concrete activity happening in a concrete 3D scene (e.g.. asking for

information in an e-goverment information office) but it could launch an agent software,

that in his behalf, should perform another activity in another 3D space (e.g.. filling an

administrative form in the tax office). Then, it is needed to set up roles, activities, norms and

obligations of participants in the social virtual world as described in the next section.