DOI:
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose the concept of a "cultural island" -- a framework with which users can virtually immerse themselves within a culture, friendly or not. Cultural islands provide a virtual world technology for a wide range of applications ranging from sampling tourist destinations to helping national security and defense analysts understand how best to reason about a particular part of the world. In this paper, we describe a formal architecture for cultural islands, and describe a prototype implementation of part of this architecture. We show how our framework has been used to build an initial prototype game appropriate for training members of the US military.