Virtual Worlds, Real Use

• By 2012 (Gartner):
• 80% of Internet users will have avatars
• Half of US companies will have “networked virtual environments”
• Beyond “Serious Games”
• Not games at all
• Virtual Worlds used to…
• Orient new hires
• Hold meetings
• Conduct specialized professional collaborations
• Offer enterprise customer service
• Create branded experiences
• Visualize data

Why do we care?

• offer a new paradigm of interaction and collaboration
• Natural way to organize, negotiate multiple activities, communication threads
• Easy way to work on shared objects synchronously
• Body positioning offers rich communications feedback

• National Science Foundation
• Human-Centered Computing
• Cyberinfrastructure
• Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation
• Science of Science and Innovation Policy

Naming Virtual Worlds:

• MUD (Multi-user dungeons)
• CVE (collaborative virtual environments)
• Virtual worlds / synthetic worlds
• Metaverse (bigger than a game and can contain many games; it’s and authoring platform to develop virtual worlds)
• MUVE (multi-user virtual environments)
• Example: SL, Active Worlds, There (less structured, open-eneded experiences)
• MMOG (massively multiplayer online games)
• Example: WoW, Everquest, Eve Online (medieval, fantasy, science fiction settings; closed fixed world designed by designers)

Definitions

• An online app where users create a character (an avatar) and interact with other users in a simulated environment
• Avatar can move, gesture, and emote
• Participants communicate via text and/or voice chat
• Shared Space: the world allows multiple users to participate at once
• Graphical User Interface: the world depcits space visually, ranging in style from SD “cartoon” imagery to more immersive 3D environments
• Immediacy: Interaction takes place in real time
• Interactivity with the environments (some): The world allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customzied content.
• Persistent: the world’s existence continues reglardless of whether individual users are logged in
• Socialization / Community: The world allows and encourage the formation of in-world social groups like guilds, clubs, cliques, housemates, neighborhoods, etc.
• Themed (wow) versus non-themed (SL, There, Active World)
• Scale – an MMO has thousands of users sharing the enviornment, Halo multiplayer has up to 16; Unreal goes up to 64

Characteristics

• Rich graphics
• Realistic simulations
• Imaginative alternative realities
• Avatars can be human, animal, robot, or jus tabout anything
• Avatar movement controlled by key board and mouse
• In-world content (artifacts, landscapes, etc.)
• Participant-created content (SL: texture can be uploaded in-world; 3D modeling tools, the linden scripting language based on java and C)
• Created entirely by product developers
• Constrained by network connectivity

CVE

• Developed in the 1990′s, in the academic setting
• An example of the technologies developed for collaboration (CSCW)
• CVEs are distributed virtual reality systems that offer graphically realized, potentially inifinte, digital landscapes. Within these landscapes, individuals can share information through interaction with each other and through individual and collaborative interaction with data representation.

CVE Characteristics

• CVEs represent the computer as a malleable space, a space in which to build and utilize shared places for work and leisure.
• A terrain or digital landscape that can be “inhabited” or “populated” by individuals and data.
• Users (as avatars) are free to navigate through the space, encountering each other, artifacts, data objects
• Users are free to user verbal or non-verbal communication through visual and auditory channels.

Motivations

• Distributed work is rapidly becoming the norm
• Workforce in big IT corporation has reached a tipping point
• Sun: on any given day, over 50% of employees are remote (even more on Fridays)
• Addressing problems resulting from distributed work
• Social interaction: increasing remote workers decreasing interaction