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.