Rebecca's Research Blog

A good blog post on why academics should blog.

A news story from early September about my twin nephews – expert canoeists, who have both won medals representing their country.

My sister notes that when the article says Peter was selected to race in Spain, it actually means Denmark :-/

Oh, and here’s how to make six-month pics with a pinhole camera.

[Note to self: really must get my del.icio.us account up and running again.]

Some useful references I jotted down while at the Handheld learning conference.

Ollie Bray’s site – currently one of my favourite blogs. danah boyd’s blog. The Edubuzz blog – which, I notice, currently contains a link to a widget that displays your Twitter updates on your blog. Tessa Watson’s blog, which has useful information and links about the conference. Why is it that other people can get pictures to look good in WordPress and I only get tiny little images or massive great images that obscure everything else on the page?

Ordnance Survey’s Map Zone – with educational games that look fun to me. Another educational game, Fantasy Farmer. And you can now play Sim City online, for free.

Other recommended games included Hot Brain for the PSP,  Hotel Dusk for the DS, Endless Ocean for the wii, and Phoenix Wright for the DS – which I’ve just taken out of the Open University library.

While at the Virtual Worlds JISC day up in Stirling, I saw a demonstration of in-world chatbots.

The Daden Prime sim has a chatbot avatar, Abi Carver. You can visit her in world, or talk to her on their chatbots.co.uk website. Like most chatbots, she’s fairly limited as a conversational partner. However, I’m told she’s beginning to get some sense of memory and emotion – and that she has situational awareness and motivation. This may be the case, although I failed to spot it.

I guess she does indicate a way forward, though. When you meet a new avatar in Second Life you may well have a bizarre conversation – either because you both have different first languages, or because one or both of you is doing something different in the real world. So, without the visual cues provided by Abi looking like a bot, she doesn’t need to talk very well in order to fool passers-by.

As the website says, chatbots like these have a future as greeters, information sources, tour guides and non-player characters.

Some web references I picked up at the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor.

Exit Reality is an application that allows you to present every web page as part of a 3D virtual world, and to move the same avatar around them. I’ve been a bit limited in my ability to try it out, as it doesn’t run on a Mac and I don’t have time to fiddle around with it at work. My first impression, though, is it takes a lot of energy because you need to configure each web page as you get there. I guess it would be fun to see my Flickr site as a 3D gallery – but I waste enough time already messing around with my pictures online and don’t need an excuse to spend more time there.

Mmogchart.com tracks 45 virtual worlds – each of which has over 10,000 subscribers. Looks like an excellent resource for research – although there doesn’t seem to be much activity on the website at present.

I was impressed by the idea of gamesusd, which apparently translates the currencies of different games into dollars. The site is there, but all its downloads are dated 2005, suggesting that the exchange information is no longer current.

A video I thought wase worth watching. ‘Make Love, Not Warcraft’ – the South Park episode set in World of Warcraft. I usually find South Park unwatchable, but enjoyed this one. I haven’t provided a link, as it tends to appear on the web and then be removed for copyright reasons – but then someone else posts it, so it’s worth Googling. Although the makers worked along with Blizzard, they apparently had to enhance the footage, because machinima made in WoW wasn’t high enough quality.

More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor.

http://nieci.bangor.ac.uk/conf/?q=en/content/abstracts

Astrid Ensslin, one of the organisers of the conference, reported on a very interesting piece of research, adapting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from the real world to the virtual world.

Maslow identified that people have to prioritise their physical suvival needs and their need for safety and security, before attending to their social needs, need for self esteem and need for self actualisation.

Astrid carried out interviews to find out what a similar pyramid would look like for avatars and came up with a very different list, which would be very useful to people creating an in-world environment. Unfortunately, I didn’t take notes quickly enough to record her version – so I’ll have to wait until she publishes her research 🙁

You learn the strangest things at academic conferences.

Not only can you now zoom around the real world via Google Maps, but you can now also view a Google Map of the World of Warcraft. Apparently, by combining information about the measurement of significant features on this map, and the distance you can cast certain spells in world, you can calculate that Azeroth is approximately 50 square kilometres.

Not only that, but the in-world land of Lord of the Rings Online is around that size, according to the New York Times. Tolkien provided a scale map of Middle Earth, which is FAR bigger than that. Putting these pieces of information together suggests that 50 square kilometres may  be the optimum size for any section of an MMPORG world at this point.

I noted down at the conference that 50 square kilometres is also the approximate size of Disney World. However, when I checked, it appears to be around 122 square kilometres – the size of the entire World of Warcraft, not just Azeroth. The World of Warcraft is therefore the approximate size of the city of Newcastle.

Milton Keynes, in case anyone was wondering, is currently only three-quarters the size of World of Warcraft.

Interesting post on issues relating to SocialLearn by Scott Leslie in his EdTech blog. These are his sub-heads:

• Planning to Share versus Just Sharing
• We grow our network by sharing, they start their network by setting up initial agreements
• We share what we share, they want to share what they often don’t have (or even really want)
• We share with people, they share with “Institutions”
• We develop multiple (informal) channels while they focus on a single official mechanism
• What to do if you are stuck having to facilitate sharing amongst a large group of institutions?

More notes on the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference in Bangor.

Jonathan Roberts and Nigel John are doing some very impressive work on being able to touch the virtual. Their research relates to training medical students to perform operations, and developing haptic technologies to do this.

They pointed out that touch is not a single sense, we have different tactile experiences, including pain, texture and muscular change. Touch provides us with feedback on our environment, telling us if a car is passing, if a tin is heavy or if coffee is hot. It also allows us to give a value to that experience – we can tell how hot the coffee is, how fast the passing car is moving, and how full the tin is.

To reproduce these affordances with technology, we require information about vibration, temperature and force. Tactile feedback provides us with information about the surface features of objects, while force feedback provides information about weight and inertia.

Haptic devices are increasingly being incorporated into technology – examples are the wii and the Logitech iFeel mouse.

At the start of half term I travelled to Bangor for the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference. It was a relatively small conference, but had participants from NZ, the US and Scandinavia among others. I was impressed by how quickly research into Second Life has moved on. A year ago I was watching very basic presentations along the lines of look-we’ve-got-an-island-now-what? This year people are working on medicine, libraries, art, economics, education, sociology – and coming up with some impressive results.

Denise Doyle aka wanderingfictions talked about the narratives and stories of virtual worlds that challenge our relationship with out own world. See her article  ‘Embodied narrative: the virtual nomad and the meta dreamer’ in International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media 3:2 (2007). She quoted Tom Boelstorff, author of  ‘Coming of Age in Second Life: an Anthropologist explores the virtually human’ as saying that avatars make virtual worlds real, if not actual. Unsurprisingly, the question of reality came up several times in the conference and there seems to be a growing consensus that it is possible to distinguish between the real (which virtual worlds are) and the actual (which they are not).