EDUCATIVE 3D VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

The objective of this communication is to present a virtual environment (VE) for educative activities in university curricula. The basic elements of a virtual educative environment are the environment itself and the avatars. We define a VE as a computer simulation of an environment in which some actors can carry out certain behaviours. The actors are the students, who introduce themselves into the environment through their avatars. The avatars are simulated characters which can move, speak, write texts or manipulate objects on the students' commands, that is, can interact with the environment. Another element we are interested in is the virtual robots, called bots or non-player characters (NPC). The bots have an appearance similar to avatars, but their behaviour is governed by scripts (computer code), not by humans. The VEs are being developed very fast, mainly for leisure purposes, but their potential deserves attention from some educative institutions. Our team is interested in developing educative VEs to implement exercises and practices for students of the Psychology degree in the University of Valencia (Spain). The main advantages of these materials over more usual, written ones, are: a) The exercises or practices are held in an environment which is more similar to the environment students will find once they are in a professional context; b) the students are required to put together the skills and capabilities they have acquired in the different subjects of their curricula in such a way as to solve problems; c) enhancement of activity as a way of learning; and d) flexibility in time and space. We are working in two main directions so far: bots and virtual environments. With regards to the bots, we are making tests with a Pandorabot whose characters and environments are supplied by SitePal. We have generated a knowledge base on AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) for the bots in such a way that they simulate the kind of dialogue that characterizes some behavioural disorders (e.g. anorexia). The student can practice the dialogue protocol required to identify the problem of the "patient". To create these virtual environments, we are operating with OpenSim and have taken advantage of the free resources available in the web. We have located in that campus bots whose characters have been taken from standard avatar characters in OpenSim and have connected them to the knowledge base in our Pandorabot in such a way that our bots are able to express themselves and simulate the psychological characters of interest. We have developed some exercises in a comprehensive way so that the students can practice the process that begins with the identification of the problem, its evaluation and the intervention required to solve that problem.