I finished up at PARC and flew back to Australia last week. One of my first tasks here is to give a presentation on my PARC project at the Australian Virtual Worlds Workshop at Swinburne Uni on Friday 28th November. Then on Friday 5th December, Bernd Ploderer and I will give a presenation on our visits to America at our Interaction Design Group seminar.
I’ve got two jobs at November’s CSCW conference in San Diego.
On Sunday 9th I’m in a workshop on Virtual Worlds, Collaboration, and Workplace Productivity. I submitted this position paper, on communicating by voice and collaborative building.
Then on Mon 10th through Wed 12th I’m helping Nic Ducheneaut and Mike Roberts give a tutorial on virtual worlds. We’ll cover three example VWs: WoW, Wonderland and SL. The tutorials are two hours long. Here is my handout.
On Sunday 2nd Nov I’m speaking at a workshop in Second Life. The workshop is run by the “At The Intersection” group and is held at Research Island Denmark from 11am to 1pm Second Life Time. The other speakers are Professor Robert Bloomfield and Sisse Siggaard Jensen, and the convenors are Marianne Riis & Dina Friis Jensen. After the three speakers there is a panel discussion with the audience, and I think it’s free for interested researchers to attend.
People on the SLRL email-list of Second Life researchers decided we should try to meet weekly in-world. We had our first meeting on Tuesday 14th Oct. At each meeting one researcher speaks about the research for 10 or 15 minutes, then hosts a group discussion using text. I’m hosting the fourth one, on Tuesday 4th Nov.
Update: Debbie McCormick of Monash University has started a wiki at http://vwresearchersgroup.pbwiki.com, containing notices of future presentations and transcripts of past ones.
My desperate rush to submit papers on time being over, I have time to make a few visits that I’d like to have made weeks ago. One obvious one is the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford Uni. I knew they’d been researching user behaviour in Second Life, because Nick Yee of PARC has worked there. VHIL published their data-gathering program on their website, and I recently adapted it and got it running on my web server.
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I submitted two papers yesterday, which kind of wraps up “phase one” of my US visit. During the past week I’ve had some more participants come and do the experiment, finished up the quantitative analysis, and did the writing. Nic and I are pretty happy with the results and think there are some interesting outcomes - hopefully other people will like it too. For more detail see our blog entry.
There are a few things I’ll try to do with the rest of my time here. I am interviewing some expert SL builders who were not part of the trials to see if our results accord with their experiences. I’ll talk to a few people about voice too, speaking of which I think I have a new take on voice in SL and how to write about it.
I’ll probably continue to live in Palo Alto as I basically like it here, though I could go live in Frisco and commute for a while. My current share house, which has been very good, stops at the end of September. I have a few visitors coming by in late October.
I felt I was getting stale in Palo Alto and decided to have a weekend in L.A. Rhonda and Natalie from Origami have moved there and I also wanted to meet Dmitri Williams of UCS and Tom Boellstorff of UC Irvine while I was in the US. When you’ve come all the way from Australia to Palo Alto, Los Angeles seems like I quick trip down the road. I wanted to drive there, for the practice, and so I could get around LA. I picked a weekend that seemed free (getting that badly wrong - ’twas the weekend before paper deadline), booked Saturday night at Santa Barbara and Sunday night at Westwood, teed up dinners and coffees, rented a car and headed off on Saturday morning.
I’ve moved into a new place in Palo Alto, where I’ll stay probably for all of September. This is a great old house with a pretty interesting bunch of people, mostly Stanford postgrads, and a chap who designs organic permaculture gardens and is making one in the front yard. So there’s interesting conversation around this dinner table. The location’s great, a few blocks fromthe University Ave shopping strip, and the WholeFoods is even closer. My best path to work now is to bike through Stanford, so I’ll get a closer look at the campus.
By coincidence one of the guys who lives here won a contest in the New Yorker with a caption that is relevant to my PARC study.
Tonight I took part in a lecture in the new University of Melbourne breadth subject “Internet Meets Society”. Pete Benda is coordinating this subject, it’s running for the first time this year and they’re trying out lots of interesting delivery formats. The lecture was about virtual worlds. We ran it as a panel consisting of Pete, Adam Nash (RMIT) and I, with Pete and Adam in the UM lecture room and me appearing via Second Life. We discussed some pre-defined topics and took questions from students. At one point we went for a walk to one of SL’s rough neighbourhoods, with interesting results. To illustrate identity issues I logged in simultaneously as two avatars and pretended they were two different people for half the lecture. We’ll write up a lectures notes handout soon and I’ll put it here.
It was a big day - in the morning I trained up to the Mission to see the Rock Make Street Festival - several bands and lots of arts and crafts. I put a few snaps on Flickr.
On 23 Aug I went to a street festival in the Mission called the Rock Make festival. They blocked off Treat street for about 100m. They had a stack of indie bands playing on two stages at either end, and a bunch of arts and crafts by local makers on sale in tents. It’s logistically hard for me to see bands late at night in the city so this was a good oppotunity to sample Frisco’s indie wares.
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