Multimodal agents in second life and the new agents of virtual 3D environments

Abstract

The confluence of 3D virtual worlds with social networks imposes to software agents, in addition to his conversational functions, the same behaviors as those common to human-driven avatars. In this paper we explore the possibilities of the use of metabots (metaverse robots) in virtual 3D worlds and we introduce the concept of AvatarRank as a measure of the avatar's popularity and the concept of the extended Turing test to assess the anthropomorphness of the metaverse's elements. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.