Integrating Agents Into Virtual Worlds

Our research efforts have been concentrated on determining how the distributed workplace can be transformed into a shared virtual environment. Interaction among people and processes in this virtual world has to be provided. To enhance the usability of our virtual collaborative environment we integrated software agents. These agents support the user and his interaction with objekts within the virtual world. The main goal includes the implementation of helpers, personal assistants, and tour guides. In this paper, we describe the basic needs for integrating agents into virtual worlds as well as techniques to map live video streams and applications into our VR environment. As a proof of concept, agents controlling the access to virtual rooms have been developed and integrated in a video-textured environment.