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in understanding the information. This makes the communication process complex
and it cannot be carried out smoothly. However, in the real world, even in a crowded
train, communication is carried out smoothly. This is because human
communication in the real world has some special features. In this subsection, we
describe how these features are introduced to multi-user IBNR.
3.3.2
Communication in the Real World
In the real world, one can see the figures of others in the same room except when
they are hidden by some obstacles; even when one cannot see others in the same
room, one must be able to hear them. This is caused by the continuity feature of
the real space, where light and sounds are transmitted. The effect of the transmitted
information decreases with the increase in distance. A person standing farther
away looks smaller and not so clear, and his/her voice may be hardly heard.
Consequently, one usually filters out such kind of unimportant information from
a distance. In other words, one usually moves closer to the information he/she
needs, and keeps a distance from the information he/she does not need.
Following the Principles of the Cyberspace by Benedikt
1)
, we proposed the above
as a new principle called the Principle of the Information Transmitting (PIT), and
regard it as an important factor in constructing virtual spaces.
3.3.3
Information Transmission in Multi-user IBNR
Multi-user IBNR allows the sharing of visual and verbal information only among
users in the same scene to maintain the independency of each scene. Therefore,
when one constructs a pseudo-3D space by dividing a room into several scenes,
users accessing the same room in different scenes are not aware of each other. In
other words, the communication space constructed in multi-user IBNR is a rather
limited space in terms of communication compared to the real world.
To make the communication space provided by multi-user IBNR more flexible,
we alter IBNR's independency feature to allow adjacent scenes to transmit
information. By applying the PIT to the virtual communication space, users can
filter out unwanted information.
3.3.4
Visualization of a Scene Based on The PIT
In multi-user IBNR, the existence of avatars and their conversations are spread to
adjacent scenes based on the PIT.
The figure of the avatar: As the distance increases, the avatar becomes dimmer,
and thus instead of being able to know who is out there, the user can only knows
that someone is out there. This is implemented by showing a dark, unclear image
of the avatar.
Conversations: Similarly, we apply the PIT to multi-user IBNR, and adjust the
size of the balloon which shows the conversation and the font size of the text to
