Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2 Related Works
Sugawara et al. researched communication in a three-dimensional virtual space
[5]. They developed a three-dimensional virtual space, called InterSpace, for
their research. In InterSpace, there is an agent who mediates communications
in a virtual space. Asynchronous communications in a virtual space have been
achieved by this agent. Then, an open experiment was carried out on the Internet
using InterSpace. The effect of the development of communities and the use of
the communications media was studied in this experiment.
Matsuda et al. developed a virtual society, called PAW, and carried out an
open experiment[6]. From the result of the open experiment, they presented
the user's profile, the effect of an event, the feature of communities, and the
communication tools for using all these together.
Nakanishi et al. studied the impact of a three-dimensional virtual space com-
munication environment[7]. From a comparison of this environment with a
face-to-face environment, they have found that the environment of the three-
dimensional virtual space contributes to an increase in the switch frequency of
the speaker.
Zhang and Bach have developed a context-aware machine translation system,
named Virtual Babel, for virtual worlds[8]. They enhance the Second Life viewer
to intercept the incoming/outgoing chat messages and reroute the message to
a machine translation. The returned translations are appended to the original
text message to help users to understand the foreign language. They have the
same issue as us. They provide a context-aware language model to estimate a
suitable domain for chat.
Our research differs from the abovementioned researches; we discuss the pos-
sibility of communication among speakers of several different languages by using
machine translation in a virtual space.
3 Multilingual Chat Support System
We have developed a multilingual chat support system by using an object
1
that
could be built in an event-driven-type script in a three-dimensional virtual space.
Portable and fixed translation systems are expected as multilingual chat com-
munications support. In the following subsections, we discuss the support form
in the three-dimensional virtual space and then describe the portable and fixed
translation systems.
3.1 Support Form of Multilingual Chat Support System
Table 1 shows the advantages and the disadvantages of a fixed and a portable
communication support system in a virtual space.
In the case of the fixed system, the translation object was set up in a certain
pre-decided place. When a user (avatar) went to this place, he/she could use the
1
An “object” is a form combined by “prim,” which is the basic object in Second Life.
