Conversational Metabots for Educational Applications in Virtual Worlds

1. Introduction To Virtual Worlds

The stunning increase in the amount of time people are spending socializing online is creating new ways of communication and cooperation. With the advances in the so-called Web 2.0, virtual worlds have grown dramatically over the last decade. These worlds or “metaverses” are computer-simulated graphic environments in which humans, through their avatars cohabit with other users. Traditionally, virtual worlds have had a predefined structure and fixed tasks that the user could carry out. However, social virtual worlds have emerged to emphasize the role of social interaction in these environments, allowing the users to determine their own experiences.

Social Networking has been a global consumer phenomenon during the last few years. According to Nielsen (2009), two-thirds of the world's Internet population visit a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10% of all Internet time. Member Communities has overtaken personal Email to become the world's fourth most popular online sector after search, portals, and PC software applications. The staggering increase in the amount of time people are spending on these sites is changing the way people spend their time online and has ramifications for how people behave, share and interact within their normal daily lives. The development of so-called Web 2.0 has also made possible the introduction of a number of applications into many users’ lives, which are profoundly changing the roots of society by creating new ways of communication and cooperation.

The advance of social networking has entailed a considerable progress in the development of virtual worlds (Arroyo, et al., 2009; Lucia, et al., 2009), in which humans, through their avatars, “cohabit” with other users. This new model is more humane because it simulates the real environments characteristics in which the human being is and has become. For humans, a 3D world is “more real,” a world in which we can feel the distance, color, sunset, the presence of our friends, in which we can use the capabilities of our senses and we can interact with objects and avatars that inhabit it. These virtual worlds or metaverses are in fact true social networks and they are useful for interaction between people in different locations. Likewise, in the three-dimensionality context it is very appropriate to develop virtual robots with the same appearance as that of the human-driven avatars. These new virtual robots are called metabots term coined from the contraction of the terms metaverse and robot. A metabot will therefore be a fully capable software completely able to interact in one or more metaverses through one or more avatars.