Development of Community Space for Multilingual Informal Communication Support Using Augmented Reality and Second Life

Language differences pose significant barriers to multilingual communication. To understand others' conversation, a person should be conversant with the language in which the conversation is being carried out. It is difficult for an individual to join a conversation that is in a language unknown to him/her. Therefore, we have developed two conversation components visualization systems: an augmented-reality-based (AR) system and a Second-Life-based (SL) system. These systems enable an individual to join the conversation. We use the following three conversation-related components: nouns, images, and emoticons. From the results of our experiments, we found that the voice and the body movements of interlocutors can influence a person's understanding of a conversation that is in a language unknown to him/her. We found that the system using the AR-based system is better at helping a person to understand a conversation than the SL-based system.