Agent-aided collaborative virtual environments over HLA/RTI

This paper introduces a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) system over the Internet. A Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) 97-based user interface is developed to permit users to navigate around the virtual world. Voice-enabled interactive agents provide a more natural interface to help users interact with each other and with the virtual world. Real-time interactions between entities in this environment are implemented over the run-time infrastructure (RTI) of the High Level Architecture (HLA). For this, a Java adapter is developed to ensure the inter-operations between the VRML environments and HLA/RTI. An application to e-commerce is highlighted.