The importance of informal communication on the Internet has been increasing in recent years. Several systems for informal communication have been developed. These systems, however, require a particular server and/or specialized 3D contents. In this paper, we propose a system, named InCom, for informal communication in a 3D virtual environment. Browsers which are component of InCom generate 3D virtual worlds from existing common 2D HTML documents. Browsers communicate in a peer-to-peer manner. Using avatars makes gaze awareness smooth. Our results show that users shared interests by gaze awareness.

In this paper, we propose a realtime concatenation technique between basic skeletal motions obtained by the motion capture technique and etc. to generate a lifelike behavior for a humanoid character (avatar). We execute several experiments to show the advantage and the property of our technique and also report the results. Finally, we describe our applied system called WonderSpace which leads participants to the exciting and attractive virtual worlds with humanoid characters in cyberspace. Our concatenation technique has the following features: (1) based on a blending method between a preceding motion and a succeeding motion by a transition function, (2) realizing "smooth transition," "monotone transition," and "equivalent transition" by the transition function called paste function, (3) generating a connecting interval by making the backward and forward predictions for the preceding and succeeding motions, (4) executing the prediction under the hypothesis of "the smooth stopping state" or "the state of connecting motion", (5) controlling the prediction intervals by the parameter indicating the importance of the motion, and (6) realizing realtime calculation.