Abstract—With billions of chat messages sent using Facebook
and similar or rather more amount of messages sent using
Google talk and Gmail Chat every day, we have millions of
people who use instant messaging .But in the recent years there
has not been much development in the human computer
interface of various instant messaging clients and it remains
restricted to sending message by typing in a textbox. This paper
uses various XMPP based instant messaging services like
Facebook Chat, Google talk and AOL chat as examples to
describe how user experience can be enhanced by merging
Virtual World with Instant messaging services.
Index Terms—Instant messaging, virtual worlds, XMPP.
I. I
NTRODUCTION
Since last few years there have not been much
improvement in instant messaging clients .The development
has come to a halt at the concept of receiving and sending text
message by opening a window and sending message by
typing in it. With more than two billion chat messages sent
using Facebook Chat and similar or rather more amount of
messages sent using Google talk and Gmail Chat every day,
we have millions of people who use instant messaging. But
there has not been much advancement in making the
experience for user more immersive and entertaining rather
than the old typing in textbox methodology. Currently all
popular instant messaging clients are unable to address this
issue of less user immersive instant messaging.
Virtual World commonly depicts a world very similar to
the real world, with real world rules and real-time actions,
and communication. Players create a character to travel
between buildings, towns, and even worlds to carry out
business or leisure activities [1]. The most famous virtual
worlds on internet are World of warcraft and Second life. We
are integrating our instant messenger with various virtual
environments instead of a complete world, this means that
our virtual environments are not related to each other and are
not there on same map. These are discreet unit of virtual
environments which can be a cafe, room or a beach. Two
examples which are created for the use in our instant
messenger are shown in Fig 1. We are using XMPP Protocol
to provide communication with existing instant messaging
services.
Manuscript received July 9, revised August 14, 2012.
Mangesh Bedekar is Lecturer at Department of Computer Science and
Information Technology, BITS Pilani K. K Birla Goa Campus (e-mail:
bedekar@bits-goa.ac.in).
Rajat Goyal is with Department of Electronics and Instrumentation, BITS
Pilani K.K Birla Goa Campus (e-mail: gyl.rajat@gmail.com )
Fig. 1. Examples of virtual environment
II. OUR APPROACH
This instant messenger provides the ability to login using
any XMPP protocol based instant messaging service and uses
XMPP protocol to send and receive chat messages .The
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an
open technology for real-time communication, which powers
a wide range of applications including instant messaging,
presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls,
collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication,
and generalized routing of XML data[2] . It has been used by
many social networking platforms including gtalk, and
facebook; collaborative services like google wave, and
gradient; geo-presence systems like Nokia Ovi Contacts;
multiplayer games like chesspark, and by many online live
customer support and technical support services[3]. Yahoo!
Also is now experimenting with open XMPP protocol. This
means than user can login using his Facebook, Gmail, AOL
account or any service which uses XMPP protocol for instant
messaging.
After user logs in, we place his avatar in the virtual
environment or if he is logging in for the first time we ask
him to select his avatar after this we import his friend list
from the service he used to login into the application, Fig. 2
Shows the login using Gmail account and the imported friend
list, now he can use this messenger as any other instant
messenger along with added benefits of virtual world. Now if
the user wants to chat with anybody in his friend list he has to
just select receivers name from the friend list, which
produces two possibilities.
First, receiver is also using this instant messenger, then
receiver’s environment will change to your environment,
receiver’s avatar will appear on the sender’s screen and
sender’s avatar will appear on receiver’s screen and they both
will be able to walk, sit, listen to music, physically interact
with each other and chat with each other using our real-time
type-telecast service by typing in the callouts. How we were
able to achieve real-time type telecast service is described the
later stages of this paper.
Second, receiver is not using this instant messenger , then
Integration of Virtual World with Existing Instant
Messaging Services
Mangesh Bedekar and Rajat Goyal
International
Journal of Machine Learning and Computing, Vol. 2, No. 5, October 2012
62310.7763/IJMLC.2012.V2.202
the receiver’s dummy avatar will appear in your environment
and you will be able to change its appearance and when you
interact with this avatar , text related to your physical actions
will be sent to receiver’s text based client .For example , If
you went and sat on the couch ; a chat message will be sent
stating “user is now sitting on the couch” .or if you hugged
the avatar of the receiver ; a chat message will be sent stating
“user hugged you” .Also, receiver will be notified that the
sender is using virtual environment based client and after
which he will be Sent with the list of all the actions he can
perform in the sender’s virtual environment by typing them
as regular chat message. For example if receiver types “Slap”
then receivers dummy avatar will go and slap user’s avatar.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 2. (a) The login screen with the option of login through various instant
messaging services like Facebook, Gmail, AOL or any instant messaging
service which uses XMPP protocol. (b) After logging in your Avatar gets
placed in virtual environment and the friend list gets imported.
We are using Flash Media Server’s shared object as the
backend to provide various interaction within the virtual
environment. With Flash Media Interactive Server or Flash
Media Development Server, you can create and use remote
shared objects, which share data between multiple client
applications. When one user makes changes that Updates the
shared object on the server, the shared object sends the
change to all other users [4]. The remote shared object acts as
a hub to synchronize many users. We use these shared objects
to simultaneously run various function which are responsible
for the movement and interaction of the avatar.
We also have tested our real-time type-telecast (similar to
what was done in Google wave) with 1sec lag, Which is very
desirable as a chatting tool these days -no typing a couple of
lines and pressing Enter, but real-time communication. We
have used Actionscript 3.0 timer event with a time interval of
100ms to write to a file whatever text is there in the avatar’s
callout textbox and we are running cron job with duration of
1sec in php to check whether the file is getting updated or not,
and as soon as the file gets update we send the updated
characters to the receiver.
III. S
OLUTIONS OF CURRENT PROBLEMS
The concept of virtual environment based Instant
messengers has been tried before with Google lively and
Cooee live messenger, but these Instant Messengers depend
totally on their own independent instant messaging service
which causes these problems,
1). Even when you have account on most famous instant
messaging services in which you are connected to all your
friends you still have to create new account for these instant
messengers.
2). Most of your friends are not there on these instant
messengers so you are left with very small social group.
3). All these instant messengers demand separate plugin
or software to be downloaded on your machine.
Till now in our project we are able to solve all these
problems by the use of XMPP protocol and Flash media
server,
1). You can login using many Instant messaging
services like Facebook Chat , Google Talk , AOL no need to
create a separate account .
2). All your friends are already present in this instant
messenger when you login and you can message friends who
are using any other text based client.
3). We are using flash as our backend therefore it can
run on any browser which has flash Plugin installed and 90%
of the computers already have flash player installed.
IV. F
UTURE WORK
For the future works, we are trying to improve the
appearance of the avatar to provide a 3D user like looking
avatar. Instead of pre rendering the graphics into 2D bitmap,
we can integrate a Flash 3D engine to render the 3D model
into isometric view in real time .Real-time 3D rendering is
the next trend of Flash. There are several3D engines
available in the market that support rendering complex 3D
models with animations. Papervision3D and Away3D are
two examples among them. 23 Million People a month (and
growing) are playing “Cafe World” on Facebook, which
utilizes Away3D for its speed and flexibility. Cafe World is
still in beta, but still very playable. The advantage of using
3D rendering in isometric is that the rotation of avatars can be
very smooth. Also different textures can share the same
model and different models can share the same animation
skeleton. Thanks to this great graphic reusability, 3D
rendering virtual world can create different combinations of
avatar appearance and animations without adding extra
graphic workload in development [5].
International Journal of Machine Learning and Computing, Vol. 2, No. 5, October 2012
624
Second thing we are planning to do is to ask user to upload
his/her photo and follow some steps so that we can map the
texture of his face on the face mesh of the avatar. We are
using a tedious but accurate method to extract the details of
the face from user’s photo, User has to upload his image and
mark points and lines on his face, the lines and points which
the user has to mark on his photo are displayed on a sample
face. For demonstration we are using software called
FaceShop[6] which uses a similar technique. The procedure
and the results are displayed in Fig 3.
Fig. 3. (a) User marks some points on his face with the same order as the
points are displayed on the sample face. (b) Avatar’s face mesh is rotated and
scaled according to the shape of the face of user. (c) User has to mark some
lines on his face and on the similar position on the avatar’s face mesh. (d)
Resulting 3D reconstruction of the face.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank Kunal Agarwal and Abhishek Kumar (Students,
Information Systems, BITS Pilani K.K Birla Goa Campus)
who with us placed the starting stepping stones of this
project.
R
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International Journal of Machine Learning and Computing, Vol. 2, No. 5, October 2012
625