Panagiotis Ritsos, Robert Gittins and Jonathan C. Roberts

p.ritsos, r.gittins, j.c.roberts @bangor.ac.uk

Virtual Worlds in Education Forum – March 2012

The IVY project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein

THE PROJECT IVY GROUP

University of Surrey (UK)

Uniwersystet im. Adama Mickiewicza (Poland)

University of Cyprus (Cyprus)

Steinbeis GmbH & Co. KG für Tech-transfer (Germany)

University of Bangor (UK - Wales)

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (Germany)

Bar Ilan University (Israel)

To present purpose of IVY and the IVY Virtual Environment (IVY-VE)

To present the strategic decisions, resulting design and implementation progress to date, towards the creation of a prototype

To provide an overview of the main features of our prototype

To allow for discussion on future development and research oriented exploitation

Presentation Outline

The rise of migration and multilingualism in Europe requires professional interpreters in business, legal, medical and many other settings.

Future interpreters need to master an ever broadening range of interpreting skills and scenarios – training for which is often difficult to achieve with traditional teaching methods.

Project IVY employs 3D virtual environment technology to create an virtual educational space that supports the acquisition and application of skills required in interpreter-mediated communication.

Project IVY Partners provide user interaction and interpreter resources – audio and video material from previous video conferencing research – ‘BACKBONE’.

Project IVY – Scope

A dedicated 3D virtual environment for interpreting students and future clients of interpreters

A range of virtual interpreting scenarios (e.g. ‘business meeting’) that can be run in different working modes: simulation, activity/exercise mode, exploration and live interaction mode;

Multilingual video-/audio-based content for interpreting scenarios, by adapting and supplementing the corpora from the LLP project BACKBONE (in

EN, DE, ES, FR, PL, TR) and adding new corpora (GR and AR, EL or RU).

Two sets of pedagogical material for interpreter students and (future) ‘clients’, e.g. awareness-raising and interpreting exercises, and explanations.

Project IVY in a nutshell

Project IVY scenario form

Dialogue

Monologue

To provide an intuitive, easy to use interface to a Virtual World for interpreting training and simulation

To allow access through that Virtual World to existing audio material of interpreting exercises and immerse participants in various scenarios

To allow easy dialogue management – addition, modification, deletion of existing dialogue scripts

To enable limited dialogue synthesis, resulting in different language combinations of existing dialogue scripts.

IVY Virtual Environment – Requirements

Dialogues are assembled from mp3 files, corresponding to the scene participants (denoted A & B) speech

They do not have to be of a particular order – i.e. dialogues can follow a sequence such as `ABBAAABAB’

Audio sequences form a dialogue script…

…which is accompanied from textual information – title, keywords (domains), description and scene

In the future we will be able to replace the audio files corresponding to a language in a script with other ones, compliant with the latter…

…allowing limited dialogue synthesis

IVY Virtual Environment – Technical Aspects - I

VE Visitors need to be able to roam freely into the areas of Project IVY, without any obtrusive GUI elements or VW noticeboards

Ideally users need to be able to `jump’ from scenario to scenario without needing to return to a `reception’ area

Audio controls need to include stop, rewind, fast-forward etc.

Main challenge is to `match’ audio events to environment events and/or avatar expressions and gestures

Dialogue management does not need to be performed from within the VE

IVY Virtual Environment – Technical Aspects - II

Second Life was chosen as the VW for our first prototype

Exploration of alternatives, such as OpenSim may follow in the future

Second Life compared to alternatives (OpenSim, ActiveWorls etc) offers:

Large community, offering various add-ons, plugins and examples of customisations

A platform for social interaction and education, used by numerous institutions, colleges, universities – thus increasing chances of exposure

Existing scenes build in Bangor Island, allowing faster scene development

Does not require that you run the VW yourself, but can access public servers

IVY Virtual Environment – Second Life

Various Scenarios - Classroom, meeting room, shops, outdoor, community centre etc.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

Various Scenarios - Classroom, meeting room, shops, outdoor, community centre etc.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

Various Scenarios - Classroom, meeting room, shops, outdoor, community centre etc.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

Interpreter students at Surrey University have already trialled basic meetings.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

Courtroom settings are also being developed – multi purpose training scenarios – interpreter and user of interpreters.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

IVY Virtual Environment – Architecture

IVY Virtual Environment – Admin Console

An Appfuse-based web application for dialogue and user management

Menu is a Heads-Up display (HUD) with same aesthetics to the SL user interface build using jQuery, Flash and Javascript as part of our web-app

IVY Virtual Environment – Menu

Simple, drill-down menu for selecting form, language pair and dialogue by title

Information Pane and Launcher

‘Breadcrumb’ for navigation

Individual per user

Allows teleportation from scenario to scenario without requiring returning to a reception area

IVY Virtual Environment – Dialogue HUD

Once a dialogue is selected a player and a teleportation confirmation window appear

IVY Virtual Environment – Player - Teleportation

Simple audio player with dialogue specific information

Exiting returns user to dialogue selection menu

IVY Virtual Environment – Player Detail

Integrate IVY HUD functionality with the virtual world by:

Controlling participant-avatars when speaking through a telnet-based `bot’ server

Each bot performs basic gestures for as long as `he’ or `she’ talks

Explore the possibility of using directional sound

Integrate tighter with SL GUI elements such as flashing voice indicators

IVY Virtual Environment – Next Steps

Where is the research element? Is it merely a development project, mixing and matching existing techniques?

The research element comes from the `service’ and not the technology…

Performance comparison to traditional methods used by interpreters

Investigation on how the sense of immersion enhances the user experience of IVY-VE participants

Definition of metrics for the above

IVY Virtual Environment – Research Element

Thank you!