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Humans in the Digital Age are continuously exploring different forms of socializing on-line. In Social 3D Virtual Worlds (VW) people freely socialize by participating in open-ended activities in 3D simulated spaces. Moreover, VWs can also be used to engage humans in e-applications, the so called Serious VWs. Implicitly, these serious applications have specific goals that require structured environments where participants play specific roles and perform activities by following well-defined protocols and norms. In this paper we advocate for the use of Virtual Institutions (VI) to provide explicit structure to current Social 3D VWs. We refer to the resulting system as hybrid (participants can be both human and software agents) and structured Virtual Environments. Specifically, we present v-mWater (a water market, an e-government application deployed as a VI), the infrastructure that supports participants’ interactions, and the evaluation of its usability.

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