The Virtual World Conference 2011

The Virtual World Conference is an annual conference exploring the uses of virtual worlds for learning, collaborative work and business. This year’s event takes place on the 14th of September and is hosted entirely in Second Life, where leading international speakers from across the globe will showcase innovation and applications within Virtual Worlds in interactive presentations designed to stimulate networking and discussion. The 2010 conference had an audience drawn from 15 countries worldwide.
Registration costs just £45, buying access to 24 hours of activity following the physical sun.

Please see www.thevirtualworldconference.org for more details.

There are still some free-of-charge spots for students.

Virtual World Collaboration Study (fully online)

In July we are conducting a study in our virtual world, investigating collaboration in 3D virtual worlds. You can participate from virtually anywhere on the planet. Participation is fully anonymous. See details here.

If you are interested please leave us a comment here (treated privately) or send an email, we will get in touch with you. Thanks!

ReLIVE11: Submission Deadline Extended

The conference Researching Learning in Immersive Virtual Environments 2011 (ReLIVE11) has just announced a deadline extension:
The deadline for submission to ReLIVE11 has been extended to May 30th, 2011.

This is a deadline for abstract submission, so it is still doable! Check the conference website for details: www.open.ac.uk/relive11

The Virtual World Conference, 14th September 2011
ReLIVE11 is linked to The Virtual World Conference, a 24-hour conference of invited speakers taking place within Second Life on the 14th of September. Please see http://thevirtualworldconference.org for more details.

Virtual World Collaboration Study

In April/May 2011 we are conducting a study in our virtual world, investigating experience design aspects for collaboration in 3D virtual worlds. This is a call for participation – you can take part from anywhere in California.
See details here.

The study will be continued also online (so participants can partake from virtually anywhere on the planet) from June onwards. Please leave me a comment here (treated privately) or send me an email if you are interested, I will get in touch with you. Thanks!

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference

Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education (VWBPE) (March 17-19) is a community-based conference that provides opportunities for participants in all virtual worlds to share current teaching, learning, and research practices in 3D virtual environments. Conference presentations focus on teaching/learning, scholarly work, projects, events, activities and new and innovative tools for virtual education. Presenters will focus on the identification of best practices in education designed for 3D virtual world technology. While most activities will happen in Second Life (Linden Lab have kindly donated 20 sims) presentations and field trips might be scheduled for other parts of the metaverse.

Announced by Debbie McCormick, VVWBPE 2011, Marketing and Communications

Research visit in Palo Alto for seven months

After the end of my five-months stay at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, I have now moved to San Francisco to work at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, formerly Xerox PARC), in the very heart of Silicon Valley.

One of two main tasks in my seven months here will be to conduct more visual focus groups, both face-to-face and in an OpenSim/Second Life environment. In collaboration with PARC and Stanford University we will ideate and design innovative collaboration patterns specifically for implementation in a virtual world, making use of the distinct features of the medium.

The second main task will then be to conduct controlled experiments in order to empirically investigate the value of the implemented novel collaboration patterns and world designs for particular collaboration tasks. These experiments will be conducted online (in-world) in local settings at several universities in the San Francisco Bay area as well as at collaborating institutions in southern California.

As another outcome of the research we anticipate to get insights into design processes for virtual world collaboration experiences. In particular, the ABC Framework (see older posts) will be tested and evaluated, and face-to-face settings will be opposed to a virtual world environment in respect of their fit for the design process.

If you would like to participate in an in-world visual focus group (in December) kindly leave a comment to this post or contact me via email.

The Virtual World Conference, September 15th

We are pleased to announce The Virtual World Conference, a unique event exploring the use of online virtual worlds for learning, collaborative work and business ventures, which will be hosted over a 24-hour period entirely in Second Life on 15 September 2010.

The one-day conference, following the sun around the globe, will bring together 21 international speakers to share ideas, showcase innovations and applications, and hold debates with a world-wide audience. This is an excellent opportunity to get a snapshot of leading research and expertise in the field, as well as network with like-minded peers.

Anna Peachey (The Open University/Eygus Ltd) and Professor Sara de Freitas (SGI/Lab Group) will chair in the European zone, with Andreas Schmeil (PARC/University of Lugano) in the American Pacific Coast time zone and Claus Nehmzow (Alcus International Ltd/Hong Kong) in the East Asian time zone.

The conference will consider how virtual worlds can change the way we learn, work and socialise, focusing on three core themes:

* Social interaction, societies and communities in virtual worlds.
* Business applications and strategies for using virtual worlds.
* Formal and informal teaching and learning in virtual worlds.

The Virtual World Conference will host trainers, experts, teachers, policy-makers, managers, consultants, tutors and researchers from industry, academia, schools and policy development, with representation from a wide range of different sectors including:

* Education: schools, colleges and universities.
* Research: universities, institutes, industrial labs.
* Training: training organisations, private foundations.
* Industry: international companies, SMEs.
* Health: hospitals and training institutions, care trusts.
* Environment: planning agencies, environmental agencies, emergency response organisations.
* Government: central government departments, agencies and local government authorities.

For more information, and to register, please see the website at www.thevirtualworldconference.org

Places are limited, so early registration is advised.

Practicing the ‘Religion’ – Collaboration Patterns

In order to explore and determine successful (innovative) practices of using virtual worlds for collaboration tasks we are pursuing the approach of investigating – or initially, describing and formalizing – them as collaboration patterns. A collaboration pattern is defined as “a set of tools, techniques, behaviors, and activities for people who meet at a place to work on a common goal, together in a group or community”, and thus combines the people with their specific intentions and the medium with its distinct features and particular design in one concept.

An early exploration of collaboration patterns in the popular virtual world Second Life resulted in a compilation of patterns, which we classified according to the surplus value they get out of being carried out in a 3D environment and the effort they require in design and implementation (see Publications).

This eventually led to the creation of our Avatar-Based Collaboration (ABC) framework: a powerful tool to scaffold collaboration experiences by supporting and fostering the ideation and design of collaboration patterns for virtual worlds. Illustration and explanation in the next post (or see Publications).

Choosing a ‘Religion’

Clearly, the offensive approach (see last post) is by far the more innovative one. The defensive one can be understood as pushing an evolution of the avatar equivalent to that of man – in the most negative way of interpreting it:

The upper half of the image depicts the evolution of man, the lower half illustrates the evolution of avatars that we can already observe in some attempts of making virtual worlds ‘productive’ to end users who want to collaborate online. The point I am trying to make here is that, following the defensive approach, we are tying avatars to interactive screens, just as we have tied ourselves to computer desks. We spend the bigger part of our work time sitting at desks, typing on keyboards and using mice while staring at flat screens (what, by the way, we also do a lot even after work). The fact that we use portable computers instead of fixed desktop computers nowadays doesn’t make it better but even worse, as we use just about any place we come across to sit down and stare at a screen, typing on a keyboard, trying hard to blind out our surroundings, reducing our body movement to finger strokes and mouse clicks, and thus damaging not only our eyes but innumerable other parts of our body in several ways. But, this blog is not about ergonomics and sustainability – it is about how the avatar can reshape the way we think.

The progress of evolution of avatars did seem very promising, especially when they were given the abilities to fly (move freely in 3D space) and play (interact with objects and with each other) in a fantastic world (a fully designable responsive environment) in which magic is accessible to everyone (easy user content creation, editing and scripting).

But then, in the last years, the path from there has been proven to be directed by the impulsive and narrow-sighted demand for immediate efficiency and productivity – the very same causes that keep us tied to our computers day by day. Motivation and engagement (not even to mention enjoyment) have become secondary. As the illustration above depicts, avatars experienced their high point of freedom and quality (or sense) of existence when interactive objects, a responsive environment, and the ability to collaborate with each other were in focus. This is starting to fade away with interactive 2D screens coming into play, as a focus of some newer virtual world platforms and developments. Believers of this what I earlier referred to as ‘defensive approach’ falsely understand 2D interactive screens as the right way towards productivity for virtual worlds, mislead by their actual work habits and an associated mindset that has come into being around online media: the fallacy of believing that imitating actual world designs and activity patterns in online media would generate the same experiences as those we get in face-to-face settings.

Truth is, though, that online media logically cannot generate the same experiences, since online media are greatly dissimilar from face-to-face settings. So, just as one should not try to simply walk in water in order to stay floating at the surface we should not try to make our avatars stand idle as their main activity, gazing into 2D screens. While walking instead of swimming in deep water will end in drowning, abusing avatars for bodiless labor on interactive screens will quickly end in frustration and in the question why this medium was chosen in the first place. (meeting online to collaboratively edit documents can be done much more efficient using slimmer, 2D collaboration tools somewhere in the ‘flat’ Web 2.0 instead – there are numerous tools that combine collaborative editing of office documents and text chat, sometimes also voice chat).

So, in conclusion, the new ‘element’ of virtual worlds requires us to regard its distinct properties and features in order to utilize it as a medium for engaging and fruitful collaboration experiences. This is the earlier termed ‘offensive approach’, the one that this blog, and my research, are pursuing.

‘Religions’ in the use of new media

Let me start this blog with some thoughts on what I believe to be the most fundamental decision when working with virtual worlds – or any other online medium, for that matter: the question of whether or not to utilize the distinct features of the medium.

In the case of virtual worlds this means either making use of 3D space and spatiality, customizable embodiment, responsive virtual architecture and landscape, configurable environment with interactive and behaving objects, navigation, physics, and the possibility of visualizing and embodying data from databases, dynamic web services, and possibly other virtual worlds, etc., or… creating a place where users’ simply ‘park’ their avatars just anywhere with a view to a 2D screen on which they enter and modify numbers in a conventional spreadsheet or edit text in a text document.

By my choice of words and the imbalance of passion towards these two opposed approaches you can already tell that I am a believer. I believe that a new technology/medium should not be used in the same way as an older, conventional one, just because that one is established. Rather should we focus on the distinct features of the new medium, to get most out of it. For example, the TV was not used to display static pages of the daily newspaper, right? For people to sit in front of it and try to read it? No, it was used to show moving pictures right away! Now, with this image in mind, thinking about virtual worlds again, why would we want to focus on displaying and editing 2D documents, when we can do so much more with this medium? (Note: this blog is concerned with collaborative work and learning only, obviously there are other applications of virtual worlds where 2D documents are not even thought of)

The answer seems apparent: because we are used to work with 2D documents. Have been doing that for the last decades. Actually, most of what we information workers do is creating, modifying, and sharing 2D documents of all kinds, day by day. Our digital world is built around 2D documents; reading and writing, the Gutenberg paradigm is still all over us. What started out as an imitation of the office world, the desktop metaphor now seems to be indispensable – it seems to be vital for collaboration tools and systems to focus on 2D documents in order to make useful collaboration tools. But… is it really?

That is to say, the answer to the question from before could be: because we don’t know yet how to best use the medium for it to support and foster our collaboration endeavors – we are not sure how to design the virtual world, let alone what to do and how to interact using these avatars. In order to get some real value out of the virtual experience, that is. This is why we stick to the traditional. And it is exactly what I am convinced we observe when we see how virtual worlds are mostly used for collaborative work and learning: avatars sitting at tables or standing still (in extreme cases directly facing a wall), and chatting – it’s like using the virtual world as not much more than a chat room with some neat graphics and an enhanced feeling of presence. Which is alright. However, it can be so much more than that.

So, there are two opposite approaches to follow, two ‘religions’ to choose from:

• the defensive approach: creating and designing virtual worlds and collaborative activities in them to best fit into our existing and established working and learning culture, or
• the offensive approach: taking up on the offer of utilizing the novel possibilities and features of virtual worlds to form innovative ways of working and learning together, utilizing the concepts of space, spatiality, and embodiment, while letting go of 2D documents for a moment.