Enabling virtual communities: Gulliver and Aveiro

In this paper we discuss two of our projects on virtual realities. First there is the virtual reality project Gulliver. This project is part of a more comprehensive project conceived by two artists, Matjaž Štuk and Alena Hudcovicová, called “Gulliver’s Museum of Living Art��?. Our part of the project involves a virtual reality version of Swift’s Gulliver figure that can be entered and explored by visitors and that contains several (virtual) facilities: a museum shop, rooms for expositions and installations, a Cabinet of Geographic Maps, etc. This virtual Gulliver is assumed to have an equivalent counterpart in reality. Visitors of the real Gulliver are assumed to be able to interact with their environment and make changes that can be observed by visitors to the virtual environment. In this paper we discuss our (as yet modest) attempts to contribute to this project by exploring and showing possibilities and problems. The second project we discuss, and their mutual relationship, is the so-called AVEIRO project: the design of an agent-oriented VR environment where we experiment with agents, agent interaction and design issues. With these example projects we show issues involved in developing virtual reality communities where visitors actively take part in events, communicate with domain agents and take part in joint activities.