Shaping 3D Multimedia Environments: The Media Square

In this paper we describe The MediaSquare, a 3D Multimedia Environment we are currently developing, where users are impersonated as avatars enabling them to browse and experience multimedia content by literally walking through it.<br> Users may engage in conversations with others, exchange experiences as well as collaboratively explore and enjoy the featured content.<br> The combination of algorithms from the area of artificial intelligence with state-of-the-art 3D virtual environments creates an intuitive interface that provides access to automatically structured multimedia data taking advantage of spatial metaphors.