Age differences in the perception of social presence in the use of 3D virtual world for social interaction

3D virtual worlds are becoming increasingly popular as tool for social interaction, with the potential of augmenting the user’s perception of physical and social presence. Thus, this technology could be of great benefit to older people, providing home-bound older users with access to social, educational and recreational resources. However, so far there have been few studies looking into how older people engage with virtual worlds, as most research in this area focuses on younger users. In this study, an online experiment was conducted with 30 older and 30 younger users to investigate age differences in the perception of presence in the use of virtual worlds for social interaction. Overall, we found that factors such as navigation and prior experience with text messaging tools played a key role in older people’s perception of presence. Both physical and social presence was found to be linked to the quality of social interaction for users of both age groups. In addition, older people displayed proxemic behavior which was more similar to proxemic behavior in the physical world when compared to younger users.     

Inspiring equal contribution and opportunity in a 3d multi-user virtual environment: Bringing together men gamers and women non-gamers in Second Life

A 3D multi-user virtual environment holds promise to support and enhance student online learning communities due to its ability to promote global synchronous interaction and collaboration, rich multisensory experience and expression, and elaborate design capabilities. Second Life^®, a multi-user virtual environment intended for adult users 18 and older, is the most cited in educational literature, so it is important to explore how college-aged students are using it to form online learning communities. Previous research suggests that there is unbalanced participation between traditional college-aged men and women with regards to 3D multi-user video games, which closely resemble Second Life^®. In this research study, we investigated in what manner women and men college students projected their virtual identities and engaged in interaction in Second Life^®, and how this influenced their learning of course content. Analysis of multiple data sources revealed that conceptions of identity, beliefs of the nature of the virtual world, and technical skill were primary factors which affected group cohesion and learning within the community. Results from this study can provide insight into the class activities that can support all learners in accessing and contributing to the multi-user virtual environment learning community.     

Universal life: the use of virtual worlds among people with disabilities

With their emphasis on 3D graphics and complex interface controls, it would appear that virtual worlds have little to offer to people with disabilities. On the contrary, multi-user virtual environments, such as Linden Lab’s Second Life platform, serve as a form of augmented reality where users transcend physiological or cognitive challenges to great social and therapeutic benefit. A number of intriguing developments exist within the accessibility sector, making barrier-free access an important aspect of the interaction experience. Examples include haptic input devices for the blind, virtual regions developed according to Universal Design principles, communities dedicated to people with cognitive disorders, the use of the avatar as counselor, and customizable personae that either transcend or represent a disabled person’s self-identity. This paper investigates research methods and case studies affiliated with virtual environments, as well as the ways inclusive design removes barriers to access for users with disabilities.     

虚拟空间中在线同源用户行为相似性研究

虚拟空间中在线同源用户具有相似行为特征,但现有相似性度量算法难以对其进行有效识别。提出一种基于序列对齐的在线同源用户识别算法,根据在线用户行为日志提取点击流数据,采用序列对齐方法计算在线用户的行为相似度,将其用行为相似度矩阵表示并对用户进行层次聚类,以识别虚拟空间中的在线同源用户,同时分析不同维度的用户特征属性对用户行为相似性的影响程度。实验结果表明,该算法能准确识别出在线同源用户,用户行为相似性受性别、户籍和教育程度3种特征属性影响较大,受年龄、社会阶层和收入水平的影响较小。     

A multi-user perspective for personalized email communities

Email classification and prioritization expert systems have the potential to automatically group emails and users as communities based on their communication patterns, which is one of the most tedious tasks. The exchange of emails among users along with the time and content information determine the pattern of communication. The intelligent systems extract these patterns from an email corpus of single or all users and are limited to statistical analysis. However, the email information revealed in those methods is either constricted or widespread, i.e. single or all users respectively, which limits the usability of the resultant communities. In contrast to extreme views of the email information, we relax the aforementioned restrictions by considering a subset of all users as multi-user information in an incremental way to extend the personalization concept. Accordingly, we propose a multi-user personalized email community detection method to discover the groupings of email users based on their structural and semantic intimacy. We construct a social graph using multi-user personalized emails. Subsequently, the social graph is uniquely leveraged with expedient attributes, such as semantics, to identify user communities through collaborative similarity measure. The multi-user personalized communities, which are evaluated through different quality measures, enable the email systems to filter spam or malicious emails and suggest contacts while composing emails. The experimental results over two randomly selected users from email network, as constrained information, unveil partial interaction among 80% email users with 14% search space reduction where we notice 25% improvement in the clustering coefficient.     

Creating genetic applications for informal science learning in multi-user virtual environments

A team of developers at the Cornell Theory Center (CTC), Cornell University's high-performance computing and interdisciplinary research center, has implemented a 3D multi-user virtual science museum, SciCentr. SciCentr is a virtual world based on Active Worlds client/server technology. Related to gaming technology, and thus attractive to youth, virtual environments can be applied to formal and informal science education in areas such as genetics, as well as to language learning and social studies. In this paper, we review the current state of our understanding of the impact of this technology on informal science learning. We attempt to identify some of the advantages of using this technology, design features of our implementation, and ideas for managing the social interaction among educational users. More specifically, we will discuss pilot user experiences focused on crop genetics in SciCentr's Plant Breeding Beds and on the related SciFair exhibits, both examples of collaborative experiences in our virtual worlds. Finally, we describe the next stage in interactive interface development for our Gene Bot feature.     

Virtual spaces and virtual layers – governing the ungovernable?

Online multi-user platforms like World of Warcraft and Twitter have one common regulatory mechanism; the End-User License Agreement (EULA). This document forms the cornerstone of the regulatory system within each of these spaces. Yet it is regularly contravened by users and providers alike. These agreements are very often the only forms of control or regulation that are present in online environments and therefore control more than user behaviour. Yet these platforms also share another feature: virtual disputes, but these are no longer confined online. Threats of violence and other criminal offences arise too, with examples including the abuse issued to Criado-Perez, and more recently, Flipovic. Criado-Perez suffered Twitter abuse and Flipovic was victimised on online message boards. Cyberspace was once deemed to be free from governmental control but the increasing disputes suggest there is now a need to consider how users of spaces such as online games, virtual worlds and social media are protected. Is it fair and practical to leave regulation to EULAs? How do users achieve redress for wrongs – through online and in-site governance mechanisms or wider controls? This work will consider some of these issues, and will suggest that there is now a need for additional layers of regulation to fill the ‘responsibility gap’ left between EULAs and the offline legal mechanisms.     

Virtual agents in retail web sites: Benefits of simulated social interaction for older users

This study investigates the benefits of simulated social interaction (social presence) through virtual agents for older users’ experience in retail Web sites, particularly with respect to age-related barriers to the adoption of online retailing. In Study 1, through four focus group interviews, we identified six social–psychological barriers to the adoption of online shopping among older users (mean age of 73 years). These included barriers relating to perceived risks, trust, social support, familiarity, experience, and search. In Study 2, a laboratory experiment with older users (mean age of 69 years) demonstrated that embedding a virtual agent that serves search and navigational/procedural support functions in the online store leads to increased perceived social support, trust, and patronage intention for the online store. Mediational analyses further revealed that the effect of virtual agents: (1) on trust is mediated by perceived social support; and (2) on patronage intentions is mediated in part by trust and perceived risks. The study provides important implications on the design of virtual agents for older users of e-commerce applications, and on building online trust and e-service patronage through virtual agents.     

User goals in social virtual worlds: A means-end chain approach

The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to investigate user goals in social virtual worlds; second, to introduce a methodological alternative (i.e., a means-end chain approach) for analyzing user goals in cyberspaces. The data were acquired from a web survey, and were analyzed by means-end chain analysis (MECA), which produces users’ goal structure in reference to a hierarchical system of interrelated goals (Olson & Reynolds, 1983). The results show that people come to social virtual worlds to satisfy their social and hedonic needs, and to escape from real world constraints, as do virtual community members and virtual gamers; they also pursue unique activities, such as creating virtual objects and selling them. On the other hand, by clarifying relations among users’ goals, MECA provides a richer explanation for user goals than prior research which only offers separate user goals for cyberspace users without explanation of relationship among goals.     

Let’s keep in touch online: a Facebook aware virtual human interface

A virtual human is an effective interface for interacting with users and plays an important role in carrying out certain tasks. As social networking sites are getting more and more popular, we propose a Facebook aware virtual human. The social networking sites are used to empower virtual humans for interpersonal conversational interaction in this paper. We combine Internet world, physical world and 3D virtual world together to create a new interface for users to interact with an autonomous virtual human which can behave like a real modern human. In order to take advantages of social networking sites, virtual human gathers information of a user from its profile, its likes, dislikes and gauge mood from most recent status update. In two user studies, we investigated whether and how this new interface can enhance human–virtual human interaction. Some positive results concluded from these studies will be guidelines on research and development of future virtual human interfaces.     

The Impact of Geographic Distance on Online Social Interactions

Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting with each other. The focus of this work is to explain the effect that geographic distance has on online social interactions and, simultaneously, to understand the interplay between the social characteristics of friendship ties and their spatial properties. We analyze data from a large-scale online social network, Tuenti, with about 10 million active users: our sample includes user profiles, user home locations and online social interactions among Tuenti members. Our findings support the idea that spatial distance constraints whom users interact with, but not the intensity of their social interactions. Furthermore, friendship ties belonging to denser connected groups tend to arise at shorter spatial distances than social ties established between members belonging to different groups. Finally, we show that our findings mostly do not depend on the age of the users, although younger users seem to be slightly more constrained to shorter geographic distances. Augmenting social structure with geographic information adds a new dimension to social network analysis and a large number of theoretical investigations and practical applications can be pursued for online social systems, with many promising outcomes. As the amount of available location-based data is increasing, our findings and results open the door to future possibilities: researchers would benefit from these insights when studying online social services, while developers should be aware of these additional possibilities when building systems and applications related to online social platforms.     

Collaborative learning in multi-user virtual environments

Multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) have captured the attention and interest of educators as remote collaborative learning environments due to their immersion, interaction and communication capabilities. However, productive learning interactions cannot be considered a given and careful consideration of the design of learning activities and organizational support must be provided to foster collaboration. In this paper, a model to support collaborative learning in MUVEs is presented. This model enables the scaffolding of learning workflows and organizes collaborative learning activities by regulating interactions. Software architecture is developed to support the model, and to deploy and enact collaborative learning modules. A user-centered design has been followed to identify successful strategies for modeling collaborative learning activities in a case study. The results show how interactions with elements of 3D virtual worlds can enforce collaboration in MUVEs.     

Beyond Leaders and Followers: Understanding Participation Dynamics in Event-Based Social Networks

ABSTRACT

Understanding user behaviors and social relations in social media has been an important topic in Human-Computer Interaction research. In this paper, we look at an emerging form of social media, Event-based Social Networks (EBSNs), which support a special type of hybrid community where people are connected online to organize themselves for offline gatherings. EBSN users are labeled as either organizers or members on existing platforms, and their behavioral and relationship patterns in offline events have not been described systematically. To understand participation dynamics in EBSNs, we present an interview study with 12 Meetup users and categorize a variety of social roles beyond organizers and members. We identify that different types of organizers, classical leaders and delegated leaders, have different relationship patterns with various types of members, including active contributors, active followers, newcomers and occasional visitors. By comparing these roles with purely offline or online communities, we discuss how participation dynamics in EBSNs reflect the intertwined impacts of hybrid community and implications of our findings for technology designs.     

Consistent Viewing and Interaction for Multiple Users in Projection-Based VR Systems

In projection-based Virtual Reality (VR) systems, typically only one headtracked user views stereo images rendered from the correct view position. For other users, who are presented a distorted image, moving with the first user's head motion, it is difficult to correctly view and interact with 3D objects in the virtual environment. In close-range VR systems, such as the Virtual Workbench, distortion effects are especially large because objects are within close range and users are relatively far apart. On these systems, multi-user collaboration proves to be difficult. In this paper, we analyze the problem and describe a novel, easy to implement method to prevent and reduce image distortion and its negative effects on close-range interaction task performance. First, our method combines a shared camera model and view distortion compensation. It minimizes the overall distortion for each user, while important user-personal objects such as interaction cursors, rays and controls remain distortion-free. Second, our method retains co-location for interaction techniques to make interaction more consistent. We performed a user experiment on our Virtual Workbench to analyze user performance under distorted view conditions with and without the use of our method. Our findings demonstrate the negative impact of view distortion on task performance and the positive effect our method introduces. This indicates that our method can enhance the multi-user collaboration experience on close-range, projection-based VR systems.     

A private versus a public space: Anonymity and buying decorative symbolic goods for avatars in a virtual world

The virtual world has become a new channel in which people can contact with others, and organizations can provide service to their customers. Selling symbolic virtual goods has also emerged as a new economy in the virtual world. Such symbolic goods cannot facilitate people to accomplish any specific tasks; people buy them simply to decorate their avatars. This study is based on the theories of symbolic consumption, self-presentation, and computer-mediated environment, to investigate why people buy decorative symbolic goods in the virtual world. The results show that people buy symbolic virtual goods for both emotional and social values. While user perceived social presence and telepresence affect both social and emotional value of symbolic goods, individual self-presentation motivation affects only social value. Besides, anonymous users in the virtual world show behaviors that differ with non-anonymous ones.     

Age differences in online social networking – A study of user profiles and the social capital divide among teenagers and older users in MySpace

The aim of this research was to investigate age differences and similarities in the use of the social networking website MySpace, to explore potential differences in social capital among older people (users over 60 years of age) compared to teenagers (users between 13 and 19 years of age). We used locally developed web crawlers to collect data from MySpace’s user profile pages, and to quantify any differences that exist in the networks of friends of older people and teenagers. Content analysis was applied to investigate differences in social activities between the two age groups on MySpace, and the way they represent themselves on their profile pages. Our findings show a social capital divide: teenagers have larger networks of friends compared to older users of MySpace. On the other hand, we found that the majority of teenage users’ friends are in their own age range (age ± 2 years), whilst older people’s networks of friends tend to have a more diverse age distribution. In addition, our results show that teenagers tend to make more use of different media (e.g. video, music) within MySpace and use more self-references and negative emotions when describing themselves on their profile compared to older people.     

Internet use and online social support among same sex attracted individuals of different ages

The current research addressed age differences in internet use among Same Sex Attracted (SSA) individuals. In general, online communities are found to be a source of social support, especially for minority group members. However, it is unclear whether younger and older SSA people differ in their use of these communities. The present research examined age differences in use of online communities, hypothesizing that young SSA people primarily use these for social interaction and support, whereas older SSA people use online communities to seek sexual contacts. Study 1 examined age differences in motives to start using these websites. Study 2 examined age differences in use of online profiles and online social support. Results of both studies confirmed our hypotheses. Younger compared to older SSA people are found to receive more online social support, whereas older SSA use the internet more for sexual purposes. Our findings provide first time evidence of the relation between sexual orientation, age and internet use.     

A direct touch table-top display as a multi-user information kiosk: Comparing the usability of a single display groupware either by a single user or people cooperating as a group

This study aimed to investigate the usability of a direct touch table-top display (D3TD) application that was designed to be used as a multi-user information kiosk (MUIK). We examined its use by either a single person or multiple user groups to determine the effect of people cooperating as a group on its usability. We compared both groups’ user performance and usability survey results. A one-way MANOVA of overall usability metrics emphasised a significant difference between the groups. Given the significance of the overall test, examining the univariate main effects revealed that the difference between the groups arose in the earlier system use stages due to differences in the success rate. There was no difference in the task completion time between the groups. Participants in the multiple user group achieved a higher task completion rate in the first phase and lower error rates in the following steps. However, the usability survey results did not reveal a significant difference between the groups. We observed that users working on the same individual task tended to help each other when working in a multi-user environment. These mutual aids occurred mostly in the earlier stages, influencing the users’ performance. The results show that a D3TD has a potential to enhance usability in terms of effectiveness when deployed as a MUIK.     

Ubiquitous conference management system for mobile recommendation services based on mobilizing social networks: A case study of u-conference

In this paper, we propose a social network-based mechanism to be aware of user contexts and to provide contextually relevant mobile services to users. A social network among users is regarded as the channel for exchanging and propagating their contexts. To efficiently discover the contexts of a certain users the contexts of his neighbors can be fused to provide mobile recommendation service to mobile subscribers. However, since the social network of a user has been fragmented into more than one, it is difficult to put the number of contexts from the fragmented social networks together (Jung, 2009b). Thereby, we mobilize all possible on- and off-line social networks to build an ego-centric social network. We have implemented the proposed system, which is called u-conference system, by collecting the social network dataset from online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, CyWorld, and co-authoring patterns in major Korean journals) and offline (e.g., co-participation patterns in a number of Korean domestic conferences). Once we have implemented the system, we have provided mobile services to the conference participants by sending text messages about time schedule of relevant presentations.