Virtual Greg

I feel like I’ve spent all of 2009 reading and writing. I have some publications to report:

• (forthcoming) Greg Wadley, Martin Gibbs and Nicolas Ducheneaut
  You can be too rich: Mediated communication in a virtual world
  in OzChi 2009, Melbourne
• (forthcoming) Greg Wadley and Nicolas Ducheneaut
  The ‘out-of-avatar experience’: object-focused collaboration in Second Life
  in ECSCW 2009, Vienna
• (forthcoming) Greg Wadley and Martin R. Gibbs
  Speaking in Character: Voice Communication in Virtual Worlds
  in William Sims Bainbridge (ed) ‘Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual’, Springer: London
• Nicolas Ducheneaut, Ming-Hui “Don” Wen, Nicholas Yee, Greg Wadley
  Body and Mind: A Study of Avatar Personalization in Three Virtual Worlds
  in CHI 2009, Boston

I’m going to Europe for most of September, to give the ECSCW paper, visit researchers, and give a talk at Roskilde University in late September. The itinerary is on my staff webpage. I blog more when I travel so watch this site go off then.

I gave my PhD completion seminar on 31st July (details at the IDG seminar page). Unfortunately this doesn’t mean my PhD is complete. In Australia this seminar is kind of a combination of “oral defence” and “last minute feedback from colleagues”.

I haven’t posted this year! But fear not I have not been idle. Over the (southern) summer I coded and analyzed data for my ‘voice in Second Life’ study and wrote it up as a conference paper. I submitted this along with a writeup of my PARC study. (These are currently under anonymous peer review so I won’t say too much detail about them.) Right now I am polishing up Chapter One of my thesis. This might turn into a book chapter too if I’m lucky.

A number of Second Life researchers met in-world in October and decided we should hold a weekly research seminar in SL, thus allowing us dispersed folk a chance to make use of the technology we are studying. At each meeting one person speaks about their research, then hosts a group discussion. We use the voice and text channels, and slides. The seminars have been very successful and I urge you to join us. There is no cost: you simply need to log into SL at the right time and find our spot. We have a wiki at http://vwresearchersgroup.pbwiki.com containing the schedule of presentations and transcripts of past ones. If you have research you’d like to discuss, just let us know.

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.

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.

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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.

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