Using pluggable procedures and ontology to realize semantic virtual environments 2.0

Allowing users to design animation procedures and share their designs with other users is a crucial function for creating personalized 3D avatar behaviors on multi-user virtual environments (MUVE's). By describing the ontology of the virtual objects in the environment to animation procedures, we allow these procedures to create customized animations for an avatar to interact with the environment or other avatars. In this paper, we attempt to realize a semantic virtual environment (SVE) in our MUVE system (called IMNET) with the concept of web 2.0 through three mechanisms: dynamical installation of animation procedures, ontology design of semantic description for virtual objects and avatars, and interaction-oriented message delivery. Based on our demonstrative applications, we have designed example semantics for the objects in the virtual world by the use of ontology. We have used two application scenarios about automatic generation of navigation path and casual interactions between users to illustrate the potential of creating sharable rich contents in a semantic virtual environment.