Virtual Greg

I finally arrived in Palo Alto! After a Melbourne winter, this town is in the middle of a Californian heat wave, temperatures over 30 degrees, though it feels like 40, making it hard to move or sleep. I caught the Caltrain from San Francisco before 9am, when it’s the commute for Silicon Valley employees around Potrero Hill. I managed to get off one station too early, looked for the street that should have been there, went on two bus rides through Stanford and eventually got to the Hotel California. I’ve been singing the song all day.
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After months of planning I’ve finally arrived in San Francisco. The trip over was fine except for a long delay in Sydney: thankfully Qantas phoned me early enough that I could spend it at home instead of at the airport. On the same flight were a Melbourne band (who I won’t name in case they’re not meant to be making money here) with their tour manager, a nice guy who mixed our HGP Tote shows in February. Got a great view of the bay area coming in, including a top down of Stanford Uni.

I went to my hotel by BART and still had a couple of hours daylight for a cable car journey. My hotel was on 4th near Market, right in the city shopping zone, which was not peaceful, but allowed easy access to public transport, with which SF is well-equipped, so I bought a three day pass and did my weekend that way. The cable cars go up and down a number of steep hills and terminate on the north side of SF; slow and creaky but a good way to look around. SF is a great looking, compact town, with colourful terraces and great views from surprising hills. I took a few snaps for Flickr.

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Our second-year Database Concepts students recently wrapped up their group projects in the course I co-lecture with subject coordinator Sherah Kurnia. Every year we assign students a semester-long project to design and build a data-driven website. This year we asked the twenty groups of five students to build a social networking site (SNS).

In our final lecture last week, we asked students to fill in a survey about the project. All those present responded, which is good in a week in which students are constantly asked to fill in surveys about their courses. Their responses were mostly very positive, and the students’ work was mostly excellent, so we consider the project a success. However SNS are a fairly new phenomenon – making this arguably a cutting-edge” undergrad projects – and not everything went the way we expected. In this post I’ll describe the thinking that went into our choice of project, and the decisions and changes of direction that happened along the way. Using the survey results, I’ll test which of our expectations panned out. If I get time I hope later to polish this up for a conference – perhaps this year’s Ascilite.

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For my final PhD study I’m looking at how the introduction of voice into Second Life in 2007 has impacted people’s experience of this virtual world. I’ve taken a kind of ethnographic approach, becoming a resident to understand the place and the people. I am also conducting more purposive data-gathering, such as interviewing residents. I conducted interviews both in Second Life and face-to-face depending on circumstances.

The situation in SL is more complex than that in game worlds, because while MMORPGs are socially complex, at least broadly speaking everyone is there for the same purpose. SL has no defined goals, and different kinds of people are doing very different things with it. So it’s hard to make a simple statement like “communicating using medium X has the following pros and cons for Second Life users” – because media effects will have different impacts on different types of use. I’ve come to the conclusion that to do this analysis I have to divide SL users into categories, then analyze the usefulness of each medium with respect to each category. That would produce a matrix with two dimensions: medium and user-type.

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During first semester (March to May 08) I’ve been working with Greg More, who teaches a design course in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT. It’s an interesting course: the students create buildings in Second Life that (by design) could not be built in real life. The word “buildings” doesn’t do justice to the creativity of these constructions. The course is almost over for this year: I understand Greg is considering opening the students’ work for public viewing.

I heard about Greg’s course when I reviewed his paper about it in the 2007 Australian Conference on Interactive Entertainment. I met Greg at the conference and he agreed I could be involved in some way. The topic of Greg’s paper was his decision to change platforms from a 3d FPS game engine to Second Life, the main advantages of SL being a simpler build interface and inbuilt social interaction (students can “walk” around the design space in SL, interacting with and commenting on each other’s work).

I’m interested in any innovative use of Second Life, but for me to get PhD data, a project has to involve a comparison of communication media. Greg successfully applied for funding to buy voice headsets for the students. This set up three ways for students to interact during the semester: in real life (usually in the computer lab), using typed text in SL, and using voice in SL.

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Adam Nash and I devised a show called When Worlds Collide and performed it for the second time in Melbourne last week. The show is based on an installation Adam built on an island in Second Life. He filled the island with geometric sculptures that play sounds when you walk near them. The installation is called Seventeen Unsung Songs and it’s on the island “East of Odyssey”. If you can get into Second Life, go have a look, it’s free and public.

I interviewed Adam for my PhD research last February and discovered we have some things in common. We’re both from Brisbane, both played in bands there in the early 80s, and both drifted into more performance-oriented music after moving to Melbourne. We have new ideas about where, when and how live music can be played. Adam’s Second Life sound-sculptures are intended to be played by passers-by in that virtual world. We came up with the idea of playing the sculptures ourselves, while piping the sound and vision to a real-world audience.

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At its core my PhD is about the way different properties of communication media cause people to choose and use the media differently.

Research into media effects on communication dates back to the 1950s, when video-conferencing and voice telephony were mooted as replacements for face-to-face business meetings. Meetings mediated by the transmission of sound and video were potentially much cheaper than face-to-face meetings enabled by long-distance travel. Researchers were interested in how well mediated meetings stacked up against the real thing. Later, text-based communication via networked computers – computer-mediated communication – became another alternative to face-to-face communication. Recently, the widespread availability of broadband Internet has allowed CMC users to add voice, video and avatar gestures to their palette of media.

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This blog has two purposes:

• to think out loud about issues concerning my PhD, and hopefully get feedback
• to stay in touch with colleagues and family while researching overseas

My PhD is about how people communicate using, or within, online virtual worlds. My focus is on comparing communication in two different media: text chat and voice-over-IP. I have looked at communication in team shooter games, massively multiplayer games, and Second Life. I began the PhD in 2005 and should wrap it up in 2009.

Between July and October 2008 I will be a visiting researcher with the PlayOn group at the Palo Alto Research Centre. This is where the world’s leading research in my field is carried out, so it’s a great opportunity for me to improve my skills and meet colleagues. It will also be a long stretch away from the folks back home, and I’ll use this blog to stay in touch with them.

During the past few years I’ve noticed a few PhD candidates writing blogs about their candidature. A recent article on this phenomenon in AJETS convinced me I should do it too. (Blogging PhD Candidature: Revealing the Pedagogy, by Mary-Helen Ward and Sandra West). I believe strongly in the thinking power of groups, and I’d love to see the PhD process opened up in this way. Of course this will only happen if people use the blog format to post comments and turn the candidates’ monologues into discussions. So if you find any of the material in here interesting and want to comment on it, please do.