Educative Distributed Virtual Environments for Children

Dorin-Mircea Popovici , Jean-Pierre Gerval (1) , Pierre Chevaillier (2) , Tisseau Jacques (2) , Luca-Dan Serbanati , Patrick Gueguen

1 L@BISEN - Laboratoire ISEN
2 ENIB - École Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Brest

This paper presents a distributed virtual reality environment for children called EVE-Environnements Virtuels pour Enfants. The virtual environment architecture is reactive agents based. The FCM-like dynamic action planning mechanism assures agent's adaptability to its environment changes. This virtual environment supports cooperation among members of a dispersed team engaged in a concurrent context. By the means of their avatars, special cases of agents, users are allowed to interact and to give decisions using cooperative mechanisms. A user-friendly interface enables teachers to create their own stories that fit with children's pedagogical requirements and generate new virtual environments according to the teacher's specifications. The implementation is based on DeepMatrix as environment server, VRML and Java as languages and Cortona VRML plug-in from ParallelGraphics. It is actually running on the Internet: http://eve.enib.fr

Mots clés: autonomous reactive agents; distributed virtual reality; fuzzy cognitive map; virtual environment

Domaines: Environnements Informatiques pour l'Apprentissage Humain; Web

Dorin-Mircea Popovici, Jean-Pierre Gerval, Pierre Chevaillier, Tisseau Jacques, Luca-Dan Serbanati, et al.. Educative Distributed Virtual Environments for Children. Journal of Distance Education Technologies, 2004, 2 (4), pp.18/40. ⟨hal-02999084⟩