Virtual Greg

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.

So now I have some free time I contacted Jeremy, who put me onto Helen who ran the Second Life study. It turns out this study was even bigger than I imagined. They had 80 undergrads logging into SL regularly for six weeks, each of them wearing a script that sent activity data to a database for later analysis. They filled in questionnaires weekly, meaning there is a lot of qual data as well. And the punchline is, they were able to do avatar conditions, so different people had different kinds of appearance, allowing a comparison of experiences. It looks like they will be mining this data for a long time. Helen and I had a coffee on campus with Glen Gibb, one-time teacher at UniMelb who has been working on his elec-eng PhD at Stanford for a few years now.

I also went on a walking tour of the campus. Students run these daily at 11am. I’ve been riding through the campus every day to get to work, but didn’t really know much about what I was riding through, and the Stanford campus is unusual. For example over 90% of undergrads live on campus, and a lot of the postgrads as well. So a lot of the campus grounds are devoted to accommodation. The biggest surprise, surprisingly, was the church in the main quad. It’s an impressive church with stained glass, pipe organ, you name it, tucked away so you wouldn’t know it was there.