Virtual Greg

With the help of the rest of the PlayOn group, Nic and Don, I’m fine-tuning the project I’ll conduct at PARC. It’s a study of how people collaborate around complex 3D objects in virtual worlds. I’m getting groups of people to build things together in Second Life, to find out how they handle things like coordination and reference.

For taskideas I’m looking at previous research into shared-video environments, where researchers did things like time pairs of users doing virtual jigsaw puzzles and the like.

Don and I prototyped the group task and recording process. We built stuff as a group (of two), recorded the viewpoint of each PC using Fraps, and I combined these later into a split-screen using Vegas. Both users wear headsets, so the video includes our conversation. We tried different tasks of different complexity, and varied whether both or only one of us knows what we’ve meant to be building. (If only one person knows, you need more communication.)

Now four groups of PARC staff and interns have run through the task, providing some good data and allowing me to fine-tune the protocol. I have a better idea of how much SL pre-training to give, appropriate task complexity, and what sorts of problems people encounter.

Update: the research has been approved and I’ve advertised for participants on Craigslist, the SL forum, and the SL researchers mailing list. I’ll wait until some people volunteer, and get cracking. In the meantime I’m writing a lit review and such.