Social Presence in Immersive 3D Virtual Learning Environments

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) has historically addressed the interaction of people with computer controlled physical worlds. More recently, there has been interest in their virtual counterparts, such as SecondLife in which humanoid avatars interact with each other and their worlds in ways that are analogous to our relationship with the physical world. Virtual and physical worlds can have complex relationships ranging from either each augmenting the other, to the provision of services, such as eLearning. Virtual-Reality extends eLearning environments (eg regular audio, video, and text,) by enabling abstract concepts and entities to be given tangible forms within the virtual world. Also, students and teachers take the form of avatars allowing them to employ avatars to establish their social presence in a wide variety of ways. This paper introduces two popular virtual reality tools, presents a comprehensive review of the literature related to social presence and describes our practical work in progress towards constructing a mixed reality iClassroom.

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