P. Ritsos & R. Gittinsp.ritsos, r.gittins - @bangor.ac.uk

Creating Second Lives 2011 – Bangor, September 2011

The IVY project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

THE PROJECT IVY GROUP

University of Surrey (UK)

Uniwersystet im. Adama Mickiewicza (Poland)

University of Cyprus (Cyprus)

Steinbeis GmbH & Co. KG für Tech-transfer (Germany)

University of Bangor (UK - Wales) .

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (Germany)

Bar Ilan University (Israel)

The rise of migration and multilingualism in Europe requires professional interpreters in business, legal, medical and many other settings.

Future interpreters need to master an ever broadening range of interpreting skills and scenarios – training for which is often difficult to achieve with traditional teaching methods.

Project IVY employs 3D virtual environment technology to create an virtual educational space that supports the acquisition and application of skills required in interpreter-mediated communication.

Project IVY Partners provide user interaction and interpreter resources – audio and video material from previous video conferencing research – ‘BACKBONE’.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scope

A dedicated 3D virtual environment for interpreting students and future users of interpreters

A range of virtual interpreting scenarios (e.g. ‘business meeting’) that can be run in different working modes: simulation, activity/exercise mode, exploration and live interaction mode;

Multilingual video-/audio-based content for interpreting scenarios, by adapting and supplementing the corpora from the LLP project BACKBONE (in

EN, DE, ES, FR, PL, TR) and adding new corpora (GR and AR, EL or RU).

Two sets of pedagogical material for interpreter students and (future) ‘clients’, e.g. awareness-raising and interpreting exercises, and explanations.

Project IVY in a nutshell

To present the technical requirements that have to be met from the IVY Virtual Environment (IVY-VE)

To present the strategic decisions, resulting design and implementation progress to date, towards the creation of a prototype

To provide an overview of the main features of our prototype

To allow for discussion on design aspects which require partner feedback

Presentation Outline

To provide an intuitive, easy to use interface to a Virtual World where the aforementioned scenarios will reside

To allow access to existing audio material from BACKBONE of interpreting exercises an scenarios

To allow easy dialogue management – addition, modification, deletion of existing dialogue scripts

Dialogues can be synthetised in a limited fashion to provide alternative scripts

IVY Virtual Environment – Requirements

Dialogues are assembled from mp3 files, corresponding to the scene participants (denoted A & B) speech

They do not have to be of a particular order – i.e. dialogues can follow a sequence such as `ABBAAABAB’

Audio sequences form a dialogue script…

…which is accompanied from textual information – title, keywords (domains), description and scene

In the future we will be able to replace the audio files corresponding to a language in a script with other ones, compliant with the latter…

…allowing limited dialogue synthesis

IVY Virtual Environment – Technical Aspects - I

VE Visitors need to be able to roam freely into the areas of Project IVY, without any obtrusive GUI elements or VW noticeboards

Ideally users need to be able to `jump’ from scenario to scenario without needing to return to a `reception’ area

Audio controls need to include stop, rewind, fast-forward etc.

Main challenge is to `match’ audio events to environment events and/or avatar expressions and gestures

Dialogue management does not need to be performed from within the VE

IVY Virtual Environment – Technical Aspects - II

Various Scenarios - Classroom, meeting room, shops, outdoor, community centre etc.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

Various Scenarios - Classroom, meeting room, shops, outdoor, community centre etc.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

Various Scenarios - Classroom, meeting room, shops, outdoor, community centre etc.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

Interpreter students at Surrey University have already trialled basic meetings.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

Courtroom settings are also being developed – multi purpose training scenarios – interpreter and user of interpreters.

IVY Virtual Environment – Scenarios

IVY Virtual Environment – Architecture

Menu is a Heads-Up display (HUD) with same aesthetics to the SL user interface

IVY Virtual Environment – Menu

Simple, Intuitive menu for selecting form, language pair and dialogue by title

Information Pane and Launcher

Essentially a Heads-up display object

Individual per user

Allows teleportation from scenario to scenario without requiring returning to a reception area

IVY Virtual Environment – Dialogue HUD

Once a dialogue is selected a player and a teleportation confirmation window appear

IVY Virtual Environment – Player - Teleportation

Simple audio player with dialogue specific information

Returns user to dialogue selection menu

IVY Virtual Environment – Player Detail

Where is the research element?

Is it merely a development project, mixing and matching existing techniques?

The research element comes from the `service’ and not the technology…

User experience assessment of the interface. Performance comparison to traditional methods used by interpreters

Definition of metrics for the above

IVY Virtual Environment – Research Element

Thank you!