Virtual worlds news

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.