Uruk is a joint research project between University of Western Sydney and Federation of American Scientists. The aim of the project is to recreate the ancient city of Uruk from the period around 3000 B.C. in the Virtual World of Second Life letting the history students experience how it looked like and how its citizens behaved in the past.

In the light of the Uruk Project the Virtual World of Second Life provides a unique collaborative environment for history experts, archaeologists, anthropologists, designers and programmers to meet, share their knowledge and work together on making the city and the behavior of its virtual population historically authentic.

One of the unique features of this project in contrast to the majority of other virtual environments existing in Second Life is the availability of so-called virtual humans (or autonomous agents). The agents are graphical characters (avatars) that “live” in the Virtual World of Second Life and reenact the typical daily activities of the ancient people. These agents are controlled by the Artificial Intelligence engine that is based on the Virtual Institutions technology.

In Virtual Institutions the agents are capable of playing different roles, communicating and interacting with other agents or humans, synchronizing their actions with other participants and collaborating with other agents or humans.

The key aims of the project are as follows:

1. 1.To create a modern technology for teaching ancient history and culture and get the students more engaged into such study by immersing them into the city and allowing them to experience the daily life of its citizens first-hand. Learning about ancient history and culture can be quite boring for some students. In our project we don’t intend to take away students’ books and offer them a video game. Instead we are developing a game-like experience for them so that they become more interested in reading a book and (at the later stage of the project) use the book to succeed in the game.
   

2. 2.To create an A.I. testbed for teaching the wide variety of A.I. techniques to the university computer science students. Being a university lecturer in a number of A.I. related subjects (and having studied it myself not so long ago) I can see how students can quickly loose interest in the subject if we start to overload them with all the mathematics and don’t help them to visualise how this mathematics works in practice. Uruk is a great project for this matter and we use it in our school to illustrate the key principles of A.I. as well as conduct student projects and assignments.
   

3. 3.To investigate the use of the combination of Virtual Worlds and A.I. as a new way of collaborative preservation of history and culture. When I started to work on this project I thought that historians, archeologists and anthropologists would have all the answers about daily life of ordinary Sumerians. I was quite shocked to learn that they actually know very little. We currently structure the preservation of such cultural knowledge around archaeological findings. We know a lot about significant people and significant events, but we know almost nothing about simple ordinary people. Even less we know about their non-verbal behaviour. What I also learned, is that such knowledge is very difficult to obtain, but not impossible. We just need to have a way to visualise the data we have, let international experts have a quick access to such visualisations and let them be able to modify it. Virtual Worlds like Second Life are very useful in this respect. Just a few days after putting my agents online, I started to receive messages from experts saying that they have evidence that Sumerians at that time would be standing while praying, or that when rowing on a boat they would have used one paddle, etc.