Abstract
There are benefits for social and behavioral researchers to conduct studies in online virtual worlds. However, typically learning scripting takes additional time or money to hire a consultant. We propose a prototype Virtual World Toolkit for to help researchers design, set up, and run experiments in Virtual Worlds, with little coding or scripting experience needed. We explored three types of prototype designs, focused on a traditional interface with pilot results. We also present results of initial expert user study of our toolkit to determine the learnability, usability, and feasibility of our toolkit to conduct experiments. Results suggest that our toolkit requires little training and sufficient capabilities for a basic experiment. The toolkit received a great feedback from a number of expert users who thought that it is a promising first version that lays the foundation to more future improvements. This toolkit prototype contributes to enhancing researchers’ capabilities in conducting social/behavioral studies in virtual worlds and hopefully will empower social and behavioral researchers by proving a toolkit prototype that requires less time, efforts and costs to setup stimulus responses types of human subject studies in virtual worlds.
Chapter PDF
References
Friedman, D., Steed, A., Slater, M.: Spatial social behavior in second life. In: Pelachaud, C., Martin, J.-C., André, E., Chollet, G., Karpouzis, K., Pelé, D. (eds.) IVA 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4722, pp. 252–263. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Gregory, B.E.A.: How are australian higher education institutions contributing to change through innovative teaching and learning in virtual worlds? in changing demands, changing directions. In: Ascilite Hobart, pp. 475–490 (2011)
B. J..B. A. C. Loomis, J. M.: Virtual environment technology as a basic research tool in psychology. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers 31, 557–564 (1999)
B. R.-M. D. Sanders, G.S.: Distraction and social comparison as mediators of social facilitation effects. Experimental Social Psych. 14, 291–303 (1978)
Moschini, E.: The second life researcher toolkit: an exploration of in world tools, methods and approaches for researching educational projects in second life. Springer (2010)
Antonio Gonzlez-Pardo, E. P., de Borja Rodriguez Ortz, F., Fernandez, D. C.: Using virtual worlds for behaviour clustering-based analysis. In 2010 ACM Workshop on Surreal Media and Virtual Cloning, pp. 9–14 (2010)
Lim, J.K.S., Edirisinghe, E.M.: Teaching computer science using second life as a learning environment. In: ICT: Providing Choices for Learners and Learning, p. 978 (2007)
Hayes, A.L., Ulinski, A.C., Hodges, L.F.: That Avatar is looking at Me! Social In-hibition in Virtual Worlds. In: Allbeck, J., Badler, N., Bickmore, T., Pelachaud, C., Safonova, A. (eds.) IVA 2010. LNCS, vol. 6356, pp. 454–467. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
M. N. H. S. Zhang, Q.: A case study of communication and social interactions in learning in second life. In: 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, p. 19 (2010)
Shailey Minocha, M.T., Reeves, A.J.: Conducting empirical research in virtual worlds: Experiences from two projects in second life. Virtual Worlds Research, vol. 3
Nick Yee, M.U.F.C., Bailenson, J.N., Merget, D.: The unbearable likeness of being digital: The persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments. CyberPsychology and Behavior 18, 115–121 (2007)
S. E., Wiecha J., Heyden R, M. M.: Learning in a virtual world: experience with using second life for medical education. J. Med. Internet Res. 12 (2010)
Zanbaka, C., U. A.,G. P., L. F. H.: Effects of virtual human presence on task performance. In: International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (ICAT) (2004)
Zanbaka, C., Ulinski, A., Goolkasian, P., Hodges, L.F.: Social responses to virtual humans: Implications for future interface design, pp. 1561–1570. ACM Press (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jaff, L., Hayes, A., Banic, A.U. (2013). VWSocialLab: Prototype Virtual World (VW) Toolkit for Social and Behavioral Science Experimental Set-Up and Control. In: Shumaker, R. (eds) Virtual Augmented and Mixed Reality. Designing and Developing Augmented and Virtual Environments. VAMR 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8021. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39405-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39405-8_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39404-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39405-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)