Motivate Them to Communicate

In the following, by considering the communication and the interaction within collaborative multi-cultural virtual environments as the most important motivational dimensions of user (children in particular) experience, we discuss the use of two metaphors, the virtual theater and the virtual classroom, in order to support collaborative learning. The educational virtual environment is presented as a shared informational agent-based space from both modeling (structure and evolution point of views) and technical (implementation) perspectives. The cooperation within the environment is preserved by interfering with virtual actors. Current implementations are based on a client-server architecture. VEHA API is used for environment description, VRML, C++, and Java are used as modeling and programming languages, and AReVi as graphical rendering and interaction API. Supplementary ARToolkit is used for hand-made marker-based interaction