Avara: A system to improve user experience in web and virtual world

Abstract

3D virtual world software is becoming a popular medium for entertainment, social interaction and commerce. To the best of our knowledge, there is no system available to facilitate the bridging between Web applications and virtual world systems in the form of information sharing, data collection and control propagation. As a result, user experience in a Web interface is not sensitive to state changes of virtual world avatars or objects. Similarly, a virtual world environment does not provide Web context-rich user experience. We address this issue and propose a bridging and context sharing architecture between the Web and virtual world applications such that Web applications can control, monitor and collect information from artifacts in the virtual worlds, and vice versa. We also implemented this architecture using existing Web and virtual world technologies. Based on this implementation, we illustrate some novel applications and present a user study to illustrate the value of the system. Copyright 2010 ACM.