Dear Wikipedia developers,
We are team 921UBB, from "Babes-Bolyai" University of Cluj-Napoca. We will
represent Romania at the Software Design invitational, at the Imagine Cup
2007 <http://www.imaginecup.com/> finals in Seoul this August. This year's
competition theme is all about education, specifically how technology can
make a positive impact.
In summary, we are developing an interactive desktop interface to Wikipedia.
We believe we can make encyclopedic information more accessible to everyone
by providing a virtual character in a 3D world that improves the user
experience with the encyclopedia.
*Scenario*: one asks a question in natural language (currently only English)
and the virtual character gives a short answer and provides more information
(the entire Wikipedia article from which the answer was extracted) on a
virtual screen. We use voice recognition and speech synthesis in order to
offer a natural way of obtaining information.
*Challenge*: since the 3D world of our application can offer more than
displaying text and pictures, we want to integrate 3D objects and animation.
We could use the virtual 3D world and the character as a presentation
platform. The problem we face is the lack of 3D content. Wikipedia doesn't
support 3D models and we believe supporting them would be a big win for the
users because there are many types of objects that can be visualized much
better in a 3D environment with support for rotation, pan, zoom, etc. than a
simple 2D static picture. Movies might be a solution but movies are not
interactive and take much more bandwidth than the 3D data.
*Your support*: we would like to know if you are interested in reviewing
such an application, make an opinion about it and, if possible, share some
of the plans regarding the support for 3D content in Wikipedia - if and when
are you going to provide support for this and what can we do in order to
speed up the process. We understand there are many technical and
compatibility issues, but we are willing to discuss them if you are
interested.
Regards,
Ovidiu Sabou
921UBB
Babes-Bolyai University
Cluj-Napoca, Romania