Abstract
As 3D environments become both more prevalent and more fragmented, studying how users are connected via their avatars and how they benefit from the virtual world community has become a significant area of research. An in depth analysis of the virtual world social networks is necessary to evaluate its worlds, to understand the impact of avatar social networks on the virtual worlds, and to improve future online social networks. Our current efforts are focused on building and exploring the social network aspects of virtual worlds. In this paper we evaluate the Second Life social network we have created and compare it to other social networking sites found on the web. Experimental results with data crawled from Second Life virtual worlds demonstrate that our approach was able to build a representative network of avatars in virtual world from the sample data. The analysis comparison between virtual world social networks and others in flat web allows us to gauge measures that better explore the relationship between locations linked by multiple users and their avatars. Using this comparison, we can also determine if techniques of personalization search and content recommendation are feasible for virtual world environments.
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Stafford, G., Luong, H., Gauch, J., Gauch, S., Eno, J. (2012). Social Network Analysis of Virtual Worlds. In: Huang, R., Ghorbani, A.A., Pasi, G., Yamaguchi, T., Yen, N.Y., Jin, B. (eds) Active Media Technology. AMT 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7669. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35236-2_41
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35236-2_41
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