AUTOMATING AVATARS IN SECOND LIFE, EDUCATIONAL

INSIGHTS AND APPLICATIONS

Santiago Domínguez-Noriega, Juan Manuel Vaca, J. Enrique Agudo

Gexcall, University of Extremadura, Avda. Santa Teresa de Jornet 38, 06800, Mérida, Spain

Gemma Delicado Puerto, Eva Domínguez Gómez

Gexcall, University of Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

Keywords: Virtual Worlds, Second Life, Bots.

Abstract: Second Life has established itself as the benchmark in virtual world education, offering a set of useful

synchronous communication tools out of the box as well as design construction and a community of

developers and educators working together to create revolutionary projects.

However, the virtual platform lacks interesting activities when tasks are designed for single users. You can

still generate exercises for the student but the sensation of immersion that provides both the motivation and

sense of reality to the student is reduced.

In light of this, our aim in this article is to apply automation technology to a virtual world avatar to remedy

these shortcomings, studying the potential of this idea through the specific implementation of a guided visit

bot.

1 SETTING THE CONTENT

With the arrival of the so-called web 2.0 newer

opportunities have appeared for internet users to

participate, share, communicate and collaborate with

one another in order to spread knowledge and

learning experiences. Unlike their predecessors, the

latest developments allow users to interact, modify

or create more dynamic and enriched information by

means of the integration of social networks and the

appearance of collaborative web projects, learning

management systems and the so-called virtual

words, learning environments which, based on

Social Constructivist Learning Theory, enhance the

development of educational perspectives on

motivation, problem-solving and collaboration

In this sense, this first chapter describes the

context of virtual world learning, focusing on the

capacity to exploit and explore Second Life.

1.1 Virtual Environments Potential for

Educational Purposes

Virtual Worlds are a combination of virtual reality

with a chat environment, also known as Multi User

Virtual Environments (MUVEs). From a technical

standpoint this is the product of the union of a 3D

graphics environment with a social interaction

systems developed for multiple users.

The original uses of these worlds (and still the

most common) are leisure and entertainment,

building communities of players who participate

daily. In the last few years virtual worlds have

become the most used videogames for young and

not so young audiences, creating an industry that is

not just limited to gambling in the virtual world, but

administering tournaments, working in advertising

and merchandising and finally becoming a host of

money.

However, Virtual worlds are currently used

outside of the gaming sector, adjusting educative

projects to the virtual environment. This new

application of technology is called MMOL

(Massively Multiuser Online Learning) and has its

353

Domínguez-Noriega S., Manuel Vaca J., Enrique Agudo J., Delicado Puerto G. and Domínguez Gómez E. (2010).

AUTOMATING AVATARS IN SECOND LIFE, EDUCATIONAL INSIGHTS AND APPLICATIONS.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 353-357

DOI: 10.5220/0002860103530357

 SciTePress

greatest exponent in the Second Life tool

(Bainbridge 2007).

1.2 Community-driven Experience and

Learning in Second Life

Although the concept of Second Life

is not entirely

new, but a modernized version of multi-user text-

based virtual environments developed decades ago

(e.g., MUDs, MOOs), the new 3D worlds can re-

create traditional classrooms where users (instructors

and students in our case), can simulate educational

applications rich in learning opportunities.

Users in Second Life are represented by avatars

(characters designed at will) which can interact with

each other and the world itself, constituting what is

called "a metaverse".

It offers a totally customizable virtual space in

both design and programming, which has led to its

use by the education community. The multimedia

capabilities of this tool make it perfect for engaging

in eminently practical activities from a remote

location as well as being an interesting alternative to

face to face oral meetings or even implementing

practical protocols in almost real environments

(Zhao & Wu 2009).

In addition, Second Life is a tool that encourages

communication between users and groups,

facilitating the development of collective and

collaborative activities. In this sense this virtual

world is already accepted as a more than useful tool

to prepare our students to work together to achieve

objectives.

1.3 Bots in Second Life: I Spy with My

Virtual Eyes

We can define a bot as a software application that

performs a specific set of tasks automatically.

Traditional examples of bots are standalone content

moderators in chat room service or web analyzers

(crawlers or spiders).

Second Life has an inworld banning policy on

bots that don’t contribute to the user community.

The so-called traffic or camping bots have been

massively used to enhance the visitor statistics for a

particular area and thereby increase their popularity

improperly.

Some useful and accepted applications for a bot

are gathering information about visitors to your

parcel or even a world traveler that stores and

processes the information it gathers, including the

communication and behavior of other users

(Pelachaud et al. 2007).

Finally, we can create bots that, apart from

retrieving data, could offer useful information to the

user. These are the most appropriate bots to provide

functionality to an educational project by interacting

with the user.

In this article we refer to a bot as a Second Life

avatar who, instead of being handled by a real

person, acts independently as a result of a previously

implemented computer code. Thus, like any other

type of avatars, bots can move about the virtual

world, interactions and role-play can vary according

to situations and contexts and can help to facilitate

learner engagement during computer-mediated

communication.

2 PROGRAMMING BOTS IN

SECOND LIFE

We are going to differentiate between two kinds of

bots. On the one hand there are bots created by

appending LSL (Linden Scripting Language) code to

a Second Life prim (a simple object) or set of prims

composing a human form, and on the other hand, it

is possible to implement a piece of software that

actually handles a real avatar, connecting it to the SL

grid with your username and password and

managing it at will. The code used with the second

option gives us more programming liberty than LSL

(strongly focused on events and states) while

building our automation. The disadvantages are that

we can produce some latency derived from the

communication of entities, although very little with

a regular high speed Internet connection.

We will choose the second option for our

developments because of the ease of integrating

external services to our implemented code in a .NET

platform. In addition, we will have no limit on the

size of the code to compile and its complexity will

not affect virtual world stability in a negative way

because the program will run on our own server. The

communication with Second Life will be limited to

the avatar automatic handle according to the specific

situations we have implemented.

2.1 Technical Resources

To create a Linden Scripting Language bot we just

need to design the 3D appearance of the wearer and

create the associated code to be added, but, if we

intend to use the second kind of bot, the so-called

“Automated avatar”, we will need some additional

resources.

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Figure 1: Entities interaction diagram involving the server,

the metaverse, the client software and the users.

There is a library called libomv

(libopenmetaverse) with functions that allows us to

perform basic operations on a character in Second

Life or other virtual worlds. From their own

website they point out how to integrate them into a

.NET project, providing an example. Although this

library is heavily used by the developer community

of Second Life it is important to mention that is still

in beta stage of development. There is an active

mailing list where you can ask for information when

something goes wrong.

There are also independent tools offering easy

implementation of Second Life bots using a

graphical interface or even a text document and

XML standard markup for virtual worlds like

MPML3D (Ullrich et al. 2008), but they all rely on

the libomv libraries to work.

2.2 Implementing an Example, the

Guided Visit Bot

After describing the common settings where

interactive bots should be applied, let us at this time

proceed to implement a specific example to find out

the restrictions of the development process. We

rather create the bot using the libomv library from

scratch. By so doing, we can learn about those

libraries from which different existing tools to

generate multimedia bots are based and we can

directly observe what they can accomplish and what

they can´t.

We own virtual land on the educational island

called Avalon where we currently develop on-line

tandem language courses (English-Spanish-English).

Here, we aim to integrate a bot to work as an

information staff or guide. There, he would offer a

virtual walk along which he would explain the

current developments made and offer details about

the lots he moves around. Finally, the bot would

provide the avatars with a safety card including

useful and reference information.

From the Visual Studio platform we have created

a C# program that performs a sequence of

movements of the avatar, and presents in the general

chat (as well as orally) a preconfigured speech, with

the possibility of changing the language even in the

middle of the speech.

Using the built in events and functions it is

relatively easy to implement an interactive avatar

that acts according to other users chat, movement or

even physical appearance.

3 APPLICATION SCENARIOS

The scenarios where the automated avatar can help

with the learning process are wide-ranging. From

applications based on open-ended questions, where

the bot would assume the role of a speaker, going

through learning scenarios based on courses, up to

becoming an essential tool for a competitive game-

based learning proposal, environment in which the

bot would act as a virtual counterpart of a human

opponent. Likewise, bots can also grow to be a

collaborator with whom to achieve the goals sought

in the activity (Derntl & Hummel s.d.).

Now, we quote some of the current developing

applications, those already implemented or still

within the research process, which are popular

among the virtual platform community and can be

helpful for CALL learning contexts (Computer

assisted language learning).

3.1 Educational Bots in Language

Learning: Can I Help You?

At the end of the day bots are imitations of human

behavior, so they can be programmed to replace an

instructor at least in part. Educational Bots are

usually designed to provide details about the

exercises you must do, to develop situations from

which questions and conclusions can be drawn, or to

act as partner in a particular activity or protocol. In

any case the possibilities of oral communication and

movement/animation make it a very interesting

resource for language learning environments to

develop exercises based on roleplays (Edwards et al.

2008).

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Figure 2: Avatars during a guided visit in Avalon Island.

Figure 3: Invoking an automatically handled avatar.

In this sense, integrated voice chat software has a

direct application. Through this tool, virtual office

hours, listening comprehension exercises or oral

exams would neglect the need of in-person

traditional teaching/learning. Another appealing

development is the inclusion of artificial intelligence

speaking bots such as A.L.I.C.E. This bot can be

trained to function within a particular context or

with specific exercises that employ other external

devices such as the Google maps API, designed to

learn languages being orientation aware

4 CONCLUSIONS

The practical applications arising from the

implementation of a permanent bot in Second Life

allow the development of synchronous activities

without the need for a partner or teacher. They also

offer an interactive way to provide information to

users who require it in the virtual world.

Nowadays there are a great deal of teaching

proposals in SL and other virtual worlds already in

use, being however, not so frequent at all the

introduction of these robot-like programs for

educational purposes. Though many can be the

causes leading to such shortage (i.e. lack of

theoretical information or technical expertise for an

effective implementation of an automatization

process as the one presented), we claim for the need

to get insight on this topic and work on the

development of authoring tools which could help to

make teacher´s work easier and straightforward.

We have implemented a concrete example using

external libraries with success, which shows that the

development of an educational automated avatar is

viable. By implementing the software in C# we have

complete freedom to use the external resources we

need and rely on a database or communicate with a

remote server if we need to. Thus, current

developments should aim to use existing services

like artificial intelligence systems or text-to-speech

software and integrate them into educational bots.

REFERENCES

LibOpenMetaverse | Open Metaverse Foundation.

Available at: http://www.openmetaverse.org/projects/

libopenmetaverse [Accessed on December 20, 2009].

Linden Lab Official:Inworld policy on bots - Second Life

Wiki. Available at: http://wiki.secondlife.com/

wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Inworld_policy_on_bots

[Accessed on December 20, 2009].

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Pelachaud, C. et al., 2007. Spatial Social Behavior in

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