Virtual worlds news

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy from University of Louisville claims that artificial conversational entities, shopping bots, and intelligent software applications became closer in their abilities and intelligence to human beings. Therefore arised the need to recognize and verify the identity of such entities just like it is necessary to authenticate the identity of people.

New, future oriented field of artimetrics, i.e. artificial biometrics, focuses on recognition, verification, and authentication of virtual agents, robots and other nonbiological entities. As a sub-field of cybersecurity, artimetrics is being developed in Cyber-Security Lab, which prides itself on being the world’s first to conduct this kind of research.

Children with autism can develop skills they normally find difficult by interacting with virtual worlds. By using multitouch, these children activate a virtual character on a screen and experiment with different social scenarios. This way, researchers can compare their responses to those displayed in real-life situations.

Small Worlds is a fast-growing online virtual world that runs in a browser instead of requiring you to download a graphics-intensive application. Members of Smallworlds create avatars and use these to have shared experiences like chatting, watching videos, playing games, or listening to music.

Pandorabots is a chat bot hosting service. From any browser, you may create and publish your own bots for web pages, instant messenger services, virtual worlds and many other places. Pandorabots utilizes a patented memory management algorithm that scales in number of bots, amount of bot knowledge, and number of conversational interactions. The bots are based on AIML and spring entirely from the work of the A.L.I.C.E. and AIML free software community.

An online game promoting the new movie Sherlock Holmes is offering players a new sort of gaming experience. The aim is to interview suspects - as Dr Watson or Holmes - to solve a robbery at the British Museum. Thanks to novel conversational “chatbots” embedded in the game, players can use natural language in their typed interrogations.

Other games have used natural language interactions before, says Rollo Carpenter, founder of Existor, the company behind the game, but these only use keywords to try to recognise what players are saying, he claims. “My script technology works by making predictions about what people will say,” he says. It then uses statistical analysis and fuzzy logic to try to find the best match for what was said against this vast number of predictions, before supplying the appropriate response.