The Netrek Collective Project endeavors to build advanced interfaces for the game netrek. Current interfaces allow the player to control only a single ship. We intend to build interfaces that allow high-level control over an entire team. These interfaces will employ perceptual intelligence technologies in development here at the MIT Media Lab's Vision and Modeling Group: vision-based body and face tracking, context-embedded speech analysis, and gesture analysis.
Context and coordination are very important in netrek. Marcus Huber explored the idea of automating this cooperation between netrek bots and found a significant advantage over uncoordinated bots. We take the different approach of building an interface to allow a human to supply strategy, coordination and structure to the bots' activities.