One of the end results of the smart house research has been the formation of the YAW or Yet Another World group. This group formed in the month following EVE4. It is made up
Figure 16: The YAW group at play with Mega Bloks (Lego clones) to experiment with construction
ideas for our environments.
of members of the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) in conjunction with members of the neighboring Interactive Computing Environments (ICE) lab and led by the ICE lab's director, Tom Moher. Part of this group is pictured in figure 16. The main concern of this group involves the creation of NICE or Narrative, Interactive, Collaborative Environments. While the group has enlarged since it's inception and the projects multiplied as a result, they have in common the desire to create an authoring environment in virtual reality that can be constructed by the user, includes some type of learning elements, will have a narrative drive and will persist beyond the actual play time with the user. In other words, using such forces as artificially intelligent smart agents, the action of the narrative will continue even though the user may not be running the story. The audience that we would be addressing is school children approximately between 6 to 8 years of age.
In addition to the educational nature of the environment, interactions within it will result in an artifact, whether it be an image, a program, or a complete story, that the user can take with her. The environments will encourage exploration, and experimentation as they are not complete from the onset. Instead, the user will build the environment and from there, a story may result. The introduction of intelligent agents will help to drive the action of the story and introduce the undefined element that will challenge the young users.
This research used the smart house idea as a spring board and incorporates many other bodies of research namely from the artificial intelligence community (see appendices for web sites). In addition, issues of education and the construction of narrative are also incorporated in this work. While research has been ongoing in the virtual reality and educational communities involving elements of this work, this group is attempting to meld these into a cohesive whole.