Related Links and Material Related Links and Material The bimonthly Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., (http://mitpress.mit.edu/jrnls-catalog/presence.html) provides the best continuous coverage of advanced research and development in virtual reality in general and distributed virtual environments (DVEs) in particular.
The IEEE's Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium--VRAIS'97 (http://www.eece.unm.edu/eece/conf/vrais/) will be held this month; its proceedings and those of former meetings are available from IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, Calif.
Audio tapes of the panel discussions from "Earth to Avatars: The First Annual Conference of the Contact Consortium," 26–27 October, 1996, with the theme "Contact, Culture, and Community in Digital Space" may be obtained from the Contact Consortium (http://www.ccon.org), Box 66866, Scotts Valley, CA 95607–6866.
As for military virtual environments, the Simulation Interoperability Workshop (formerly known as the DIS [for Distributed Interactive Simulation] Workshop) is held twice a year; see http://siso.sc.ist.ucf.edu/siw/index.htm.
Both VRML standards 1.0 and 2.0, as well as their related documents, can be found at the VRML Repository (http://www.sdsc.edu/vrml/), which is hosted by the San Diego Supercomputer Center in California. The site is also an excellent resource for VRML-compatible software, hardware, and the latest VRML-related news.
The proposed Living Worlds standard as well as related documents are to be found at http://www.livingworlds.com, complete with a technical tutorial, codes, and comments. The basis for the Open Community proposal--Spline--and an application built on it are presented in "Diamond Park and Spline: A Social Virtual Reality System with 3D Animation, Spoken Interaction, and Runtime Modifiability," writtne by Richard C. Waters, et al., and published as a MERL Technical Report 96–02, Cambridge, Mass., January 1996.
The Open Community proposal is on-line at http://www.merl.com/projects/opencom/, along with its application programming interface specifications. The MERL site also provides discussions of its social virtual reality research and an interactive tour of Diamond Park (http://www.merl.com/projects/dp/).
Also of note are NTT Software's CyberCampus (http://www.is.ntts.com) and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science's Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) system (http://www.sics.se/dce/dive/dive.html).
A provocative study of the psychological implications of Internet interaction is Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995).
The Web is home to many companies exploring the commercial possibilities of DVEs--typically by supplying tools to build, deploy, or populate shared virtual spaces. The best way for readers to get a feel for what these tools can do is to visit worlds built using them; in most cases, the vendors offer pointers to those worlds, as well as the free software needed to visit them. Among the companies promoting DVE technology for profit are:
In addition, some 20 companies belong to the Solution Group, software and hardware vendors whose simulation products can be readily integrated. The Solution Group was founded in 1994 by Paradigm Simulation Inc., Dallas. Paradigm's home page is at http://www.paradigmsim.com.
The Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation, from 1996, is the latest in a series of annual conferences dealing with various Computer Generated Force (CGF) issues. Copies may be ordered over the Web at http://www.ist.ucf.edu/labsproj/labs/cgf/cgfconf/cgfpub.htm or from the Institute for Simulation and Training, University of Central Florida, 3280 Progress Dr., Orlando, FL 32826–0544; 407-658-5052.
Extensive documentation about High Level Architecture (HLA) can be obtained from the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office's Web page http://www.dmso.mil/.
The Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization's Web page (http://stds.sc.ist.ucf.edu/) describes the process that developed the IEEE Standard 1278.1, Standard for Distributed Interactive Simulation--Application Protocols.
"Intelligent Agents for Interactive Simulation Environments" by M. Tambe, M. Lewis Johnson, and others in AI Magazine, Vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 15–39, provides a good discussion of the use of Soar (which originally stood for State, Operator, and Result) in DIS environments. For more in-depth information about Soar, read "Soar: An Architecture for General Intelligence," by John E. Laird, Allen Newell; and Paul S. Rosenbloom, in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 33, no. 1, September 1987, pp. 1–64, or visit http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/soar/.
Information as well as a short downloadable movie of the animated avatars in the U.S. Marine Corps' Team Tactical Engagement Simulator are to be found on the home page of Boston Dynamics Inc. at http://www.bdi.com/di_guy.html.
"Reliable Audio for Use over the Internet," by Vicky Hardman, Martina Angela Sasse, Mark Handley, and Anna Watson, from the 1995 International Networking Conference (INET '95), contains a good overview of the techniques involved in real-time speech conferencing over the Internet, as well as a study of current methods of reconstructing lost speech packets. This paper is available on the Web at http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/publications/inet95_paper/.
"Auralization--an Overview," by Mendel Kleiner, Bengt-Inge Dalenbac, and Peter Svensson, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Vol. 41, no.11, November 1993, pp. 861–75), describes several virtual-acoustics systems that have been implemented, and presents much of the theory behind auralization.
Elizabeth M. Wenzel's article, "Localization in Virtual Acoustic Displays," Presence, Vol. 1, no.1, 1992, pp. 80–107, presents a good survey of three-dimensional audio. It introduces many of the important technical and practical concerns of implementing and applying 3-D audio to virtual environments.