Cerva

The theme of the project Virtual Theater was inspired by First Forum for Virtual Technologies: the Fables of La Fontaine and the XXI-st century Technologies (Virtu@Brest2001), which shows that games instill positive values in children, contrary to violence under its various guises. Originally, the project was thought of as a context for research and development, whose main objective was to create an interface easy to use and reuse, which would permit the authors to create scenarios, imagine, and test staging and characters. Given the educational value of the project, in time it turned into an educational instrument. The main objective of the project was to encourage teamwork. Children from different countries and cultures are induced to cooperate; they have to reach a common objective, i.e., to stage a play. We hope that a multicultural framework will stimulate curiosity and mutual respect. To give meaning to cooperative work, the metaphor of the virtual theater was adopted. The stage of a play in this case is peopled with avatars associated to users (who can participate either as actors or as spectators) or as virtual actors (when the users of a stage do not coverall the parts in the play) whose behavior expressed by means of the scenario and other conditioning dependent on the evolution of the environment.