TABLE OF CONTENTS Themis Panayiotopoulos, Nikos Avradinis
Knowledge Engineering Lab, Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus
80 Karaoli & Dimitriou Street, 185 34 Piraeus, Greece
E-mail: {themisp@unipi.gr , avrad@unipi.gr }
Recent advances in computer graphics technology have led to the introduction of virtual reality technology to a wider audience. The relatively new trend of intelligent agents was quickly applied to virtual reality systems, producing a new research area, Intelligent Virtual Agents that is a meeting point for Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality. Nowadays, Intelligent Virtual Agent applications have started appearing on the web, aiming to take advantage of the potential of the new medium. In this paper we attempt to give a concise presentation of this fascinating new research area, providing a brief historical overview and discussing essential concepts related to IVA s, Web 3D and their combination.
The last fifteen years have been a period of significant change and evolution in the field of human-computer interaction. The introduction of multimedia and hypermedia technology that took place in the late '80s and its wide expansion in the early '90s presented computer professionals with a new set of tools, allowing them to produce better applications, both in terms of usability and aesthetic quality.
When Virtual Reality became available as a technology, the user was no longer treated as an external viewer. He/she had actually become part of the system, an autonomous presence in the virtual world. He/she was free to navigate around the virtual environment, move in three dimensions, interact...
