• (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”.

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’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.

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.

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.

The drive to Santa Barbara was mostly uneventful, just a long hot drive through the desert. Of the three routes you can take I chose highway 101, a large eight lane highway like the Hume. It was a compromise between the fast but apparently relentlessly straight 5 and the long coastal 1.

I stopped at San Miguel, a historic town with ruins of an old Spanish mission. Every town in California seems to have a “Mission street” or “Mission district”, usually the oldest part, dating from the Spanish religious missions that began European settlement here. There is one in Santa Barbara too.

After going through the desert most of the way the 101 reaches the ocean at Pismo Beach, where I stopped for cool air. There is about 5 or 10 miles of little beach towns, a bit like Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. I wanted to take highway 1 from here to SB but got lost around Orcutt, got gas at Los Alamos, and got back on the 101 and drove to Santa Barbara.

Expecting SB to be a small town and knowing there is a famous university campus near the water, I pulled off 101 at a randomly-selected exit, drove for a while towards the beach and asked some passers-by “am I near USCB?”, to find out I’d passed it 10 miles back. So I drove off in another random direction to find my motel. Random driving doesn’t work in big towns. By the time I found the motel a niggling car problem from the afternoon was happening more frequently and I decided to call roadside care about it before driving more. A warning light was flashing “service airbag”. I figured this could mean two things – either the bag is broken and won’t inflate if I crash (not too worried), or it might inflate while I’m driving down the highway at 60 mph (instant death). I ended up having to drive to the SB airport, where luckily my rental firm has an office, to swap the car there.

Next morning I drove back to UCSB for a better look. Apart from being 5 miles out of Santa Barbara proper this is about the best campus location you can imagine. They are right on the beach – I mean as in walk out of the lecture theatre into the surf. Marine sciences are well represented. Tooby and Cosmides, inventors of evolutionary psychology, work here.

Next stop was Ventura Beach, where I found a good cafe and walked on the sand for a bit. From here I had another go at taking the old coastal highway 1, because I could find my LA hotel easily by taking a left at Santa Monica, a beach suburb that I know. But I got lost a second time and ended up back on the 101 at Camarillo. The freeway gets pretty crazy from here to LA – 8 to 10 lanes of fast moving traffic, like a giant flooded river of cars, going through spectacular mountains. It eventually gets in amongst the upscale “valley” region of LA, though unfortunately you don’t see much from the freeway. I took a right at the 405 and drove south to Westwood near UCLA, where my hotel was. The 405 is another magnificent freeway that goes over the top of the Hollywood Hills, past the Getty Center on a mountain and downhill into LA proper.

I was surprised how easily I could find my way around West LA, my sole experience of it being a tourist bus tour a year and a half ago. I went for a drive around Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Hills. I checked out the 405 south and started getting a “check engine” light on the dashboard of my (replacement) rental car. I knew the LA office of my car rental firm was at LAX – “in the area” – I stopped and drove away in my third car for the weekend, a red Chevy Cobalt.

At 5pm I drove to Fairfax for dinner with Rhonda and Natalie of Origami fame. We had dinner at a nearby vegetarian restaurant where apparently they see starts occasionally. The ladies have good jobs in LA and seem to be retiring Origami in favour of a new poppier band with a different name.

On Monday I met Tom and Dmitri in Long Beach for morning coffee. Tom lives there and Dmitri isn’t too far away. I drove south down the 405, which is pretty crazy at that hour, and managed to get lost again. As the freeway turned south-west I faced into the morning sun and could no longer read signs. I accidentally got into an exit lane and before I knew it I was heading north back up the 10 toward the city. I took the next exit west from Compton, did a U-turn, found an onramp to the 405 and headed south again, this time finding Long Beach and eventually the Portfolio cafe.

We had a good discussion. All of us are studying behaviour in virtual worlds in some way or another, but Dmitri is quantitative, Tom’s an ethnographer and I’m somewhere in between. Tom has done a lot of field-work in Indonesia and worked at ANU. Dmitri has just published a major paper data-mining Everquest.

Last stop for me was a quick trip to Disneyland. I know that if Ellen comes to the US, this place will be on the agenda, and since it isn’t too far from Long Beach I took the opportunity to check out accommodation. After this I went back to LAX, returned the car, and got on the 6pm flight to Frisco, BART, Caltrain and back home. I feel like I need a holiday now.

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.

One of the guys and I brought some furniture from a dumpster using our two bikes and his two bike trailers, something I’ve never used before.

There’s no tv and the house is environmentally-minded – a lot of stuff is recycled or goes into compost, and I’m learning about urban agriculture by helping in the garden.

My Linux laptop reads the internet here, so I’ve given back the Mactop I borrowed from work.