The gulliver project: Performers and visitors

This paper discusses two projects in our research environment. The first is the Gulliver project, an ambitious project conceived by some artists connected to our research efforts. The second is the Aveiro project, also ambitious, but with goals that can be achieved because of technological developments, rather than being dependent on artistic and 'political' (for which read 'financial') sources. Both projects are on virtual and augmented reality. The main goal is to design inhabited environments, where 'inhabited' refers to autonomous agents and agents that represent humans, real-time or off-line, visiting the virtual environment and interacting with other agents. The Gulliver environment has been designed by two artists, Matjaz Stuk and Alena Hudcovicova. The Aveiro project is a research effort of a group of researchers trying to design models of intelligence and interaction underlying the behaviour of (groups of) agents inhabiting virtual worlds. In this paper we survey the current state of both projects and we discuss current and future attempts to have music performances by virtual and real performers in these environments.