Table of Content Section No.
Contents
Page No.
1
Acknowledgement
2
2
Background
2-3
3
Technological Definition
3
4
Application of Virtual World
3-4
5
Programs of Artificial Intelligence (AI) 4-5
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Future Prospects
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7
Text Mining Tools
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8
Text Mining Software’s
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9
Limitation of Virtual world
7-8
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Conclusion
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11
References
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Acknowledgement We would like to show our greatest appreciation to madam. We can’t say thank her enough for her tremendous support and encouragement. The guidance and support received from all the members who contributed, was vital for the success of the project. Thanks to them. Without her encouragement and guidance this project would not have materialized.
Background 8
The concept of virtual worlds predates computers. In fact, it can be traced to the Roman naturalist Gaius Plinuis, more commonly known as Pliny the Elder, who expressed one of the earliest recorded interests in perceptual illusion. In the twentieth century, the cinematographer Morton Heilig explored the creation of the Sensorama, a theatre experience designed to stimulate the senses of the audience— vision, sound, balance, smell, even touch (via wind)--and so draw them more effectively into the productions Among the earliest virtual worlds implemented by computers were virtual reality simulators, such as the work of Ivan Sutherland. Such devices are characterized by bulky headsets and other types of sensory input simulation. Contemporary virtual worlds, in particular the multi-user online environments, emerged mostly independently of this research, fueled instead by the gaming industry but drawing on similar inspiration. While classic sensory-imitating virtual reality relies on tricking the perceptual system into experiencing an immersive environment, virtual worlds typically rely on mentally and emotionally engaging content which gives rise to an immersive experience. Maze War (also known as The Maze Game, Maze Wars or simply Maze) was the first networked, 3D multi-user first person shooter game. Maze introduced the concept of online players in 1973-1974 as "eyeball 'avatars' chasing each other around in a maze.� It was played on ARPANET, or Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, a precursor to the Internet funded by the United States Department of Defense for use in university and research laboratories. The initial game could only be played on an Imlac, as it was specifically designed for this type of computer. The first virtual worlds presented on the Internet were communities and chat rooms, some of which evolved into MUDs and MUSHes. The first MUD, known as MUD1, was released in 1978. The acronym originally stood for Multi-User Dungeon, but later also came to mean Multi-User Dimension and Multi-User Domain. A MUD is a virtual world with many players interacting in real time. The early versions were text-based, offering only limited graphical representation and often using a Command Line Interface. Users interact in role-playing or competitive games by typing commands and can read or view descriptions of the world and other players. Such early worlds began the MUD heritage that eventually led to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, more commonly known as MMORPGs, a genre of role-playing games in which a large number of players interact within a virtual world. Some prototype virtual worlds were WorldsAway, a two-dimensional chat environment where users designed their own avatars; Dreamscape, an interactive community featuring a virtual world by CompuServe; Cityspace, an educational networking and 3D computer graphics project for children; and The Palace, a 2-dimensional community driven virtual world. However, credit for the first online virtual world usually goes to Habitat, developed in 1987 by LucasFilm Games for the Commodore 64 computer, and running on the Quantum Link service (the precursor to America Online). In 1996, the city of Helsinki, Finland with Helsinki Telephone Company (since Elisa Group) launched what was called the first online virtual 3D depiction intended to map an entire city. The Virtual Helsinki project was eventually renamed Helsinki Arena 2000 project and parts of the city in modern and historical context were rendered in 3D.
Technological Definition
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According to the American Heritage Dictionary, virtual means "existing or resulting in essence or effect though not in actual fact, form, or name." It can also mean "created, simulated, or carried on by means of a computer or computer network." Therefore, virtual reality is best described as an illusion of reality created by a computer system. A person may enter a world of virtual reality by putting on special glasses and headphones attached to a computer system running the virtual reality program. These devices immerse the user with the sights and sounds of the virtual world. Some virtual reality systems allow the user to also wear gloves with electronic sensors that can be used to touch or move virtual objects. As the user moves his head or hands, the computer moves the virtual world accordingly in real-time. Whatis.techterget.com: Virtual reality is an artificial environment that is created with software and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment. On a computer, virtual reality is primarily experienced through two of the five senses: sight and sound. Webopedia.com: An artificial environment created with computer hardware and software and presented to the user in such a way that it appears and feels like a real environment. Virtualworldsreview.com: A virtual world is an interactive simulated environment accessed by multiple users through an online interface. Virtual worlds are also called "digital worlds," "simulated worlds" and "MMOG's." Pcmag.com: A 3D computer environment in which users are represented on screen as themselves or as made-up characters and interact in real time with other users.
Application •
Architecture: Virtual Reality system let the user explore a 3D scene in real time, showing exactly what this user wanted to see, on demand, without having previously computed it.
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Visualization: Virtual reality really shows its strength for visualizing complex data when it has a notion of volume. VR visualization is also very powerful in applications involving abstract data that are multi-dimensional.
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Entertainment: This is the biggest application in terms of financial profitability. Many companies are producing games that use Virtual Reality principles.
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Manufacturing: In manufacturing applications, we see all levels of 3D computer assisted design systems (CAD) up to the full blown Virtual Reality system, using high-end head mounted displays and VR gloves.
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Augmented Reality: An AR system, contrary to a VR system, is made to mix both the real and the virtual scene around the user.
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Art: Virtual reality has also found many applications in arts. From generating music using VR pointing devices to virtual reality painting applications in CAVE systems.
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Education & Training: There are many types of Computer Mediated Learning, including: Computer Based Training (CBT), Distance Learning via email assignments, The Virtual Classroom (Turoff, NJIT), Audio and videoconferencing (CuSeeMe), Real time workgroup
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collaborative systems (Netmeeting, Placeware), Bulletin Board posting methodology (Lotus Notes, conferencing, threaded web discussions) •
Medical: The medical application uses augmented reality VR systems. Other medical applications are more oriented toward a fully synthetic virtual world and are used for training purposes.
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Virtual Communities & Distributed VR: Ultimately, virtual reality will evolve in a fully integrated and networked communication medium that allows people to create and decorate personal space to socialize through a virtual world.
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Virtual Workspace: Numerous companies are attempting to extend or adapted shared virtual spaces for use in a business setting. Some recent applications of trials of virtual worlds are: Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto CA, uses VRML for US Navy training, Boeing has used traditional immersive virtual reality systems extensively for visualization of aircraft designs.
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Worlds for Commerce: No commercially successful environment has yet to emerge, but plenty of experimentation is going on such as - Virtual Island Records and Tower Records shops in various virtual worlds, VISA Banking lobby, Virtual Malls, Planet 9 Studios, San Francisco, www.planet9.com, develops VRML for retail, commercial uses by modeling in 3D complete city commercial districts.
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MMORPG: The largest and most common type of virtual world is the "MMORPG" which stands for "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game." Examples include Everquest, Lineage 2, and World of Warcraft.
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Political Expression: Virtual worlds can serve as forums for political expression and debate. A great example of a virtual world with a political focus is AgoraXchange.
Programs of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an advance branch of science that studies the process of human thinking and attempts to apply the knowledge to simulate the same process in machines. As computers are far ahead in the marathon of processing machines, AI is considered to be the branch of Computer Science than that of General Science. There have been many research and development in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The area of research include speech and pattern recognition, natural language processing, learning from previous experiences (learning by making and correcting mistakes!), reasoning under the situations providing limited or incomplete information etc. AI is practically applied in the field of computer games, expert systems, neural networks, robotics and many other fields of science and technology. Some programs are applied using these technologies: •
Time sharing
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Handwriting recognition
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Interactive interpreters
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Speech recognition
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Automatic storage management
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Automation
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Symbolic programming
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Biologically inspired computing
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Functional programming
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Concept mining
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Dynamic programming
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Data mining
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Knowledge representation
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Diagnosis (artificial intelligence)
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Semantic Web
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Game theory and Strategic planning
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Face recognition
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Artificial Creativity
• Game artificial intelligence and Computer game bot • Natural language processing, Translation and Chatterbots
• Computer vision, Virtual reality and Image processing
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Nonlinear control and Robotics
Air Operations Division (AOD) uses AI for surrogate operators for combat and training simulators, mission management aids, support systems for tactical decision making, and post processing of the simulator data into symbolic summaries. The AOD also uses artificial intelligence in speech recognition software. A medical clinic can use artificial intelligence systems to organize bed schedules, make a staff rotation, and provide medical information. Artificial neural networks are used as clinical decision support systems for medical diagnosis, such as in Concept Processing technology in EMR software.Artificial intelligence is implemented in automated online assistants that can be seen as avatars on web pages.
Other Examples are: ELIZA: Eliza, Joseph Wiezbaum's result of trying to make a program converse in English amazed people when it appeared in mid 1960's. The program was able to converse about any subject, because it stored subject information in data banks. SHRDLU and block worlds: With SHRDLU's comprehension and logic, AI reached a new level. The name SHRDLU was actually borrowed from MAD magazine, and is made up of, as its author Terry Wingrad explained, the seventh through twelfth frequently used letters in the English language. Hacker: Hacker, developed in the MIT lab, lays to rest the common myth that a computer will never be able to program itself. Hacker is able to write programs for the computer that it is running on. Sam: Sam is a program from Yale's AI lab which is able to read between the lines, and assume certain facts. Chat50: AI stand-alone chat (Turing) system Billy21: AI chat simulator which learns from humans.
Future Prospects •
Augmented Reality: People can augment their physical lives with virtual realities. This may ultimately affect our perceptions of physical wants. Also, future virtual world will use augmented reality apps that let you look through the camera to see things that aren't physically there.
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Virtual world access will be more ubiquitous than Web access. . Most people who are online will have an avatar and use VW [virtual worlds] for all kinds of activities from meeting and chatting with friends to learning and doing business.
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The network of machines will be larger than the Web architecture today. Google has a couple hundred thousand machines–the virtual world will have tens of millions of hosts
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Creative way of Business: In one Second Life shop, 830 residents are making greater than $1,000 per month from selling virtual clothing. Just like the Web, a network effect business is driven by creativity and economic success.
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Appealing for humanity: because they have the potential to bring a more balanced offense and defense, whereas the real world moves people closer to a larger radius of damage like wars.
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More time in VW: people will spend more time in virtual worlds than on the ’standard’ Web.
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Mirror worlds: technologies included augmented reality--immersive, location-aware and selftracking; Lifelogging--technology used for always-on recording of everything and everyone around us.
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Virtual modes of reality: advanced versions of things like Google Earth.
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The world will eventually be totally cloaked in real-time graphical overlays. In general, you can already see that trend that people like 'real things' in their virtual worlds.
Text Mining Tools Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers to the process of deriving high-quality information from text. Typical text mining tasks include text categorization, text clustering, concept/entity extraction, production of granular taxonomies, sentiment analysis, document summarization, and entity relation modeling (i.e., learning relations between named entities). The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), is the first publicly funded text mining centre in the world. In the United States, the School of Information at University of California, Berkeley is developing a program called BioText to assist biology researchers in text mining and analysis. Text Mining can be applied in security, biomedical, software, online media, marketing, sentiment, academic applications.
Text Mining Software Text mining computer programs are available from many commercial and open source companies and sources. ♣ AeroText: provides a suite of text mining applications for content analysis. Content used can be in multiple languages. ♣ Autonomy: suite of text mining, clustering and categorization solutions for a variety of industries. ♣ Endeca Technologies: provides software to analyze and cluster unstructured text.
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♣ LanguageWare: text analysis libraries and customization tooling from IBM ♣ Mathematica: provides built in tools for text alignment, pattern matching, clustering and semantic analysis. ♣ Thomson Data Analyzer: enables complex analysis on patent information, scientific publications and news. ♣ Carrot2: text and search results clustering framework. ♣ GATE: natural language processing and language engineering tool. ♣ Fair Isaac: leading provider of decision management solutions powered by advanced analytics (includes text analytics). ♣ OpenNLP: natural language processing ♣ Leximancer: makes automatic concept maps of text data collections ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣ ♣
Text Analysis Info: offering software and links for Text Analysis and more Textalyser: online text analysis tool, providing detailed text statistics TextPipe Pro: text conversion, extraction and manipulation workbench. TextQuest: text analysis software Odin Text: actionable DIY Text Analytics, with a focus on market research.
♣ Enkata: providing a range of enterprise-level solutions for text analysis.
Limitation of Virtual World •
Absence of Real world: One can definitely miss the happiness or joy of real-world in a virtual world and can often feel socially isolated. High degrees of realism can be modeled but require high degrees of work. Many details of the physical world that we take for granted cannot yet be practically generated by the average VR system.
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Speed of processing Data: The speed of processing this data is an issue closely related to the amount of data that can be stored by the hardware based on the model used.
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Ability of represent real situation: one area of major concern is the ability of data models to fully represent all complex forms of the real world.
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No Social Interaction: one do not have the pleasure that comes out of looking around in a real world and finding out how his fellows are reacting.
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Needs high class PC: in order to use virtual world PC needs to be high class means graphics card that can render 3D.
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High Cost: Although the cost of VR has been extremely prohibitive in the past, prices in VR continue to drop whilst improvements in technology continue to make VR more user friendly. Still, it isn’t cheap.
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Limitation of device: There are limitations with VR devices as well in regards to usability. For example, an empirical study on usability concerns with head-mounted display (HMD) simulations. Common problems included “HMD cable entanglement around the user or chair, HMD weight, incorrect HMD fit, and nausea associated with HMD use”
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Side effects in medical application: VR in medical treatment is going through some growing pains. Most troublesome are the side effects it can induce, like disorientation, dizziness and nausea.
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Absenteeism of cues: Many of the cues in the physical world that help us to understand how to act in physical space are absent in computer simulations
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Graphics aren't perfect yet. One of the bigger problems is lighting and shadowing. To make realistic materials technologies such as RealReflect need to be developed. Sound - there is still no good programmatic sound generation. It's all samples, mostly. Global physics - it's possible to simulate several objects (cars, planes) very accurately, but an all-encompassing simulation is still too complex for the tech we have. Simulation of acceleration, tactile contact and everything else related to physically "being there". AI to make the world come alive
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Conclusion Over the past several years, virtual worlds have become increasingly popular. Virtual worlds are no longer sources of amusement or recreation—they are now fully functional communication and networking tools. One aspect that is predominant in each of these applications is the fact that they all try to enhance a system that is already successful in its own area of expertise. The use of Virtual Reality is successful when it brings something new, when it adds value to the whole experience while maintaining the viability and usefulness of a product. These are all, in fact, general recommendations that are valid for VR systems as well as any other type of systems. For a VR application to be successful, it must add content to the information presented to the user. Too often, we see poor Virtual Reality applications that were designed only to visually impress the user with colorful images and animations. Most of the time, these systems have a short life because they were not really thought to facilitate resolving a particularly difficult task, but more to showcase a "cool" technology. If past technological revolutions are any indication of what may happen in the future, virtual worlds will continue to expand into our collective lives and add interesting new features and experiential opportunities.
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