The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds

1. The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds Presented by Yeshwanth Boppana Sowmya Nagubadi

2. overview • Introduction • SL and WOW • Virtual Laboratory Experiments • Observational Social and Economic Science • Computer and Information Science • Human Challenges • Critical Views • Critical Questions

3. Introduction • Online virtual worlds have great potential as sites for research in social, behavioral and economic sciences, as well in human-centered computer science. • The diversity of current virtual worlds can be represented by SL and WOW. • Virtual worlds suggest new potential for education across all sciences.

4. SL and WOW • SL and WOW have many similarities in the 3-D Virtual worlds, objects, user interaction etc. • SL has 6.5 million users registered and WOW has 8.5 million subscribers. • SL is especially designed to mount formal experiments in social psychology or cognitive science. • WOW is a better option for nonintrusive statistical methodologies examining social networks and economic systems.

5. Contin… • Researchers are exploring methods needed to create entirely new generation games called pervasive LARPs (live-action role-playing games). • Interestingly most of the virtual world users are adults.

6. Virtual Laboratory Experiments • SL facilitates creating online laboratories that can automatically recruit potentially thousands of research subjects. • Creative scientists may be able to design experiments that are feasible in virtual worlds but were never possible before. • Virtual worlds combine both AI agents and human-controlled avatars implies many rigorous experiments on this crucial issue can be conducted in them. • Political experiments can also be carried in VW.

7. Auction House in WOW

8. Second Life

9. Observational Social and Economic Science • Many scientists and scholars are already conducting research about virtual worlds and are using them as environments to ask general social-scientific questions. • Economists say results of different VWs can be compared to nations on earth. • Research on cultural boundaries in VWs include studies of gender specific behavioral norms in non-traditional environments .

10. Wow is suitable for quantitative research, and encourages individual to write “add-on” programs. • Analyzing tools are being developed to analyze data from servers that run another major online role-playing game.

11. Computer and Information Science • Major drawback of VWs is high latency and low bandwidth. • Management of bandwidth in WOW and its drawback. • AI representations of humans to real world can be more complex and features like responding creatively, is been worked upon.

12. Human computer interaction is one field where virtual worlds can be used as laboratories. • Wow and SL images are restricted to only screens. Future development in this area is possible.

13. Human Challenges • One of the major issue is the cognitive and emotional relationship between humar user and their representative are actively debated. • Security issues are not focused in virtual world. Examples : Company meetings etc • Online research may require ethics scrutiny by institutional human subject review boards. • Transformation of some kinds of education at pre-college level might harmonize with scientific values more than traditional values.

14. Critical Views • It was mentioned in the paper that virtual laboratories will need sometimes huge numbers to conduct surveys. But getting so many people into action is a very difficult task. There are issues like interest of participation, time, knowledge, cost, etc. So with all these constraints how far the virtual laboratories will be a success is thought provoking. • The paper goes describing the issues with examples as SL or WOW. We can agree a major part of issues could be covered with these two. But apart from gaming and creating from existing pre-developed VW(virtual world), there could possibly be more constraints out of this boundary.

15. When there are still network and technical issues(latency) related to online gaming in virtual worlds, can we predict a perfect virtual world at the door step of every user? There was only a question raised about it but no suggestions were given. • The main focus of paper was on the credits of VW and its potential of research in future. An alarming thing is when it is involving so many users and other constraints, a potential risk is also present. There is no mention regarding it. (Example: if organizations are holding meetings in VW isn’t there a risk of confidential data leak?)

16. Critical questions: • An interesting question that arises when we read the paper is, virtual world can be said as all the communication mechanisms mixed together to make one sophisticated tool. It has many advantages, but isn’t the attention given to virtual world and potential of its future and research is beyond the limits? • As given in paper there are many knots for an experiment to be carried out in virtual laboratory, as the companies involved must be ready to participate invest and implement features in their games. How far can the virtual laboratory be successful with so many constraints? • Right now VR(virtual reality) is restricted only to computer monitors. Do people really demand for a perfect full VR which is not restricted to computer monitors or will the existing VR satisfy the demands of people?

17. Questions?