John Dickerson, M. Vanina Martinez, Diego Reforgiato, V.S.
Subrahmanian In this paper, we propose the concept of a
"cultural island" -- a framework with which users can virtually
immerse themselves within a culture, friendly or not. Cultural
islands provide a virtual world technology for a wide range of
applications ranging from sampling tourist destinations to
helping national security and defense analysts understand how
best to reason about a particular part of the world. In this
paper, we describe a formal architecture for cultural islands,
and describe a prototype implementation of part of this
architecture. We show how our framework has been used to build
an initial prototype game appropriate for training members of
the US military. Subjects: 2. Architectures; 6.4 Virtual Reality
Submitted: Jun 19, 2008