Ovidiu Sabou wrote:
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.
Does the 3D world actually do something (eg. you "walk" to "Greece" to
view its article) or is it just a "3D Office assitant"?
*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.
Could be interesting.
*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.
Wikipedia is based on a browser. How do you expect the users to such 3D
data? Note that Wikipedia will refuse it if it's unfree.
It is er.. terrific.