In this paper we describe a way of controlling the emotional states of a synthetic character in a game (FantasyA) through a tangible interface named SenToy. SenToy is a doll with sensors in the arms, legs and body, allowing the user to influence the emotions of her character in the game. The user performs gestures and movements with SenToy, which are picked up by the sensors and interpreted according to a scheme found through an initial Wizard of Oz study. Different gestures are used to express each of the following emotions: anger, fear, happiness, surprise, sadness and gloating. Depending upon the expressed emotion, the synthetic character in FantasyA will, in turn, perform different actions. The evaluation of SenToy acting as the interface to the computer game FantasyA has shown that users were able to express most of the desired emotions to influence the synthetic characters, and that overall, players, especially children, really liked the doll as an interface.

Game development is an emerging area of development for new types of interaction between computers and humans. New forms of communication are now being explored there, influenced not only by face to face communication but also by recent developments in multi-modal communication and tangible interfaces. This demo will feature a computer game, FantasyA, where users can play the game by interacting with a tangible interface, SenToy (see Figure 1). The main idea is to involve objects and artifacts from real life into ways to interact with systems, and in particular with games. So, SenToy is an interface for users to project some of their emotional gestures through moving the doll in certain ways. This device would establish a link between the users (holding the physical device) and a controlled avatar (embodied by that physical device) of the computer game, FantasyA.

A vital component of any application or environment is security, and yet this is often one of the lower priorities, losing out to performance and functionality issues, if it is considered at all. This paper considers a spatial approach to enabling, understanding and managing access control that is generally applicable across a range of collaborative environments and applications. Access control is governed according to the space within which subjects and objects reside, and the ability to traverse space to get close to an object. We present a framework that enables the SPACE access model [4], previously presented as an access model solely for collaborative virtual environments, to be applied across a number of collaborative systems. This framework is exemplified through mappings of the model to 3D and 2D collaborative environments, namely Spline [1], TeamRooms [19] and Orbit [16]. One particularly interesting feature of the model is the way in which it handles group access by considering how group credentials are determined. These credentials are presented to the model in the usual manner. We conclude by presenting some limitations of our approach, and workarounds.

We present an experiment that investigates the behaviour of small groups of participants in a wide-area distributed collaborative virtual environment (CVE). This is the third and largest study in a series of experiments that have examined trios of participants carrying out a highly collaborative puzzle-solving task. The results reproducing those of earlier studies suggest a positive relationship between place-presence and co-presence, between co-presence and group accord, with evidence supporting the notion that immersion confers leadership advantage.

Article Access control in virtual environments Share on Authors: Adrian Bullock Department of Computer Science The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK Department of Computer Science The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UKView Profile , Steve Benford Department of Computer Science The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK Department of Computer Science The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims VRST '97: Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technologySeptember 1997 Pages 29–35https://doi.org/10.1145/261135.261142Online:01 September 1997Publication History 7citation446DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations7Total Downloads446Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Room metaphors have become increasingly popular as a basis for CSCW systems. The paper describes how such metaphors might be extended to support large scale communication through the introduction of a spatial model for mediating conversations in virtual computer spaces. The model is described in terms of an abstract mathematical framework and the paper then outlines how this might be applied to various kinds of CSCW system. As a next step, the combination of rooms into larger virtual structures is considered and this results in proposals for structuring, navigating and mapping a large virtual Cyberspace for cooperation. Finally, the paper describes a current prototype application and reflects on some of the architectural issues involved in its realisation as a distributed system.