Autonomous Agents in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Our world is now entering an age where the current understanding of telecommunications and graphics computing will be constantly challenged. The universal advancement of graphics technology, new business models, and the continuing upgrade of global infrastructure are transforming the solitary, platformcentric 3D computing model. With the availability of global information highways intercontinental collaboration using 3D graphics will become part of our daily work routine. The 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 and improved. To enhance the usability and functionality of our collaborative virtual environment we integrated software agents into it. These agents support the user as well as the designer and the interaction with objects in the virtual world. In this paper, we describe the basic needs for combining agents and virtual worlds as well as techniques to enhance VR environments.