978 3 642 11743 5

Lecture Notes of the Institute
for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics

and Telecommunications Engineering 33
Editorial Board
Ozgur Akan
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
Paolo Bellavista
University of Bologna, Italy
Jiannong Cao
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Falko Dressler
University of Erlangen, Germany
Domenico Ferrari
Università Cattolica Piacenza, Italy
Mario Gerla
UCLA, USA
Hisashi Kobayashi
Princeton University, USA
Sergio Palazzo
University of Catania, Italy
Sartaj Sahni
University of Florida, USA
Xuemin (Sherman) Shen
University of Waterloo, Canada
Mircea Stan
University of Virginia, USA
Jia Xiaohua
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Albert Zomaya
University of Sydney, Australia
Geoffrey Coulson
Lancaster University, UK
Fritz Lehmann-Grube Jan Sablatnig (Eds.)
Facets of Virtual
Environments
First International Conference, FaVE 2009
Berlin, Germany, July 27-29, 2009
Revised Selected Papers
13
Volume Editors
Fritz Lehmann-Grube
Technische Universität Berlin
Center for Multimedia in Education
and Research (MuLF)
Straße des 17. Juni 136
10623 Berlin, Germany
E-mail: lehmannf@math.tu-berlin.de
Jan Sablatnig
Technische Universität Berlin
Institute of Mathematics
Straße des 17. Juni 136
10623 Berlin, Germany
E-mail: jan@math.tu-berlin.de
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Preface
In recent years, the popularity of virtual worlds has increased significantly and they
have consequently come under closer academic scrutiny. Papers about virtual worlds
are typically published at conferences or in journals that specialize in something en-
tirely different, related to some secondary aspect of the research. Thus a paper dis-
cussing legal aspects of virtual worlds may be published in a law journal, while a
psychologist's analysis of situation awareness may appear at a psychology conference.
The downside of this is that if you publish a virtual worlds paper at an unrelated
conference in this manner you are likely to be one of only a handful of attendees
working in the area. You will not, therefore, achieve the most important goal of at-
tending conferences: meeting and conversing with like-minded colleagues from the
academic community of your field of study.
Virtual worlds touch on many well-established themes in other areas of science.
Researchers from all these fields will therefore be looking at this new, interesting, and
growing field. However, to do effective research related to these complex constructs,
researchers need to take into account many of the other facets from other fields that
impact virtual worlds. Only by being familiar with and paying attention to all these
different aspects can virtual worlds be properly understood.
We therefore believe that the study of virtual worlds has become a research field in
its own right. To date, this research field can claim only a relatively small community,
because interested researchers from more established fields largely keep to them-
selves. FaVE was born to change that. We wanted to start creating a multidisciplinary
community of academic researchers all interested in virtual worlds and their applica-
tions; and we wanted everyone to talk to each other, regardless of their original field,
because we do believe that every one of these researchers has something to say that
will be of interest to the rest.
After much organizational work and with lots of help from collaborators all over
the world (and of course some sleepless nights), the conference was finally held dur-
ing July 27–29, 2009. The tracks and sessions were organized with our multidiscipli-
nary goal in mind: that is, we attempted to create sessions with a combination of pre-
senters who are working on similar subjects, albeit perhaps coming from different
angles. Over the course of the conference, our attendees did indeed see the advantages
of the format. By the end of the conference, there were vivid and vibrant discussions
going on, bringing all the diverse viewpoints to the table––surprisingly similar in
some cases and surprisingly different in others.
The first set of papers presented at the conference talked about the application of
virtual worlds to science, both for research and for education. Virtual worlds are seen
as a means to solve problems that have been known to science for a while, but which
are expected to become more pronounced in the near future––such as data visualiza-
tion and extending the reach of scientific teaching. The following papers were
presented:
VI Preface
• “Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The

Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA)” by S. G. Djor-
govski, P. Hut, S. McMillan, E. Vesperini, R. Knop, W. Farr, M. J. Graham
• “Dual Reality: Merging the Real and Virtual” by Joshua Lifton and Joseph A.
Paradiso
• “Development of Virtual Geographic Environments and Geography Re-
search” by Fengru Huang, Hui Lin, Bin Chen
The next few papers addressed how people behave and react in existing virtual
worlds. This not only characterized how people move and navigate, but also included
very tangible advice on how one might improve the usability and acceptance of virtual
worlds, such as by adding landmarks and improving the virtual weather. These papers
comprised:
• “Landmarks and Time-Pressure in Virtual Navigation: Towards Designing
Gender-Neutral Virtual Environments” by Elena Gavrielidou and Maarten
H. Lamers
• “Characterizing Mobility and Contact Networks in Virtual Worlds” by
Felipe Machado, Matheus Santos, Virgilio Almeida, and Dorgival Guedes
• “The Effects of Virtual Weather on Presence” by Bartholomäus Wissmath,
David Weibel, Fred W. Mast
Next, we took a look at what can be done to make virtual worlds easier to use for
the end user. This ranged from a shop assistant who attempts to understand typed
speech, through a visualization plug-in architecture, to an analysis of current virtual
worlds' Terms of Service and how those may be improved. The papers here were:
• “The Role of Semantics in Next-Generation Online Virtual World-Based
Retail Store” by Geetika Sharma, C. Anantaram, and Hiranmay Ghosh
• “Complexity of Virtual Worlds' Terms of Service” by Holger M. Kienle,
Andreas Lober, Crina A. Vasiliu, Hausi A. Müller
• “StellarSim: A Plug-in Architecture for Scientific Visualizations in Virtual
Worlds” by Amy Henckel and Cristina V. Lopes
We subsequently discussed the theory and practice of collaboration in virtual
worlds. A formal description of virtual world collaboration was developed that may be
used to describe workflow in a virtual world setting. Also, an actual workflow was
studied experimentally and some requirements for characters controlled by artificial
intelligences in interacting efficiently with human users were set out. The papers were:
• “Formalizing and Promoting Collaboration in 3D Virtual Environments - A
Blueprint for the Creation of Group Interaction Patterns” by Andreas
Schmeil and Martin J. Eppler
• “Usability Issues of an Augmented Virtuality Environment for Design” by
Xiangyu Wang and Irene Rui Chen
• “Conceptual Design Scheme for Virtual Characters” by Gino Brunetti and
Rocco Servidio
Preface VII
Finally, we focused on the social aspects of using virtual worlds. While in tradi-
tional media the media produces content and consumers consume it, these lines are
blurred in virtual worlds. This touches on many important questions such as owner-
ship and rights. Does a user of a virtual world even have rights? The mixing of play
and work that is becoming noticeable in many virtual worlds was also explored. The
Papers were:
• “The Managed Hearthstone: Labor and Emotional Work in the Online
Community of World of Warcraft” by Andras Lukacs, David Embrick, and
Talmadge Wright
• “Human Rights and Private Ordering in Virtual Worlds” by Olivier
Oosterbaan
• “Investigating the Concept of Consumers as Producers in Virtual Worlds:
Looking Through Social, Technical, Economic, and Legal Lenses” by
Holger M. Kienle, Andreas Lober, Crina A. Vasiliu, Hausi A. Müller
The papers are an interesting read and we hope that you take the time to peruse a
few that may not be quite in your area of research.
Organization
Steering Committee
Imrich Chlamtac Create-Net, Italy
Sabine Cikic Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger Harvard University, USA
General Conference Chair

Richard A. Bartle University of Essex, UK
General Conference Vice Chair

Sven Grottke University of Stuttgart, Germany
Technical Program Chair

Jan Sablatnig Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Workshops Chair
Fritz Lehmann-Grube
Panels Chair
Julian R. Kücklich University of Arts London, UK
Local Arrangements Chair

Publicity Chair
Sebastian Deterding Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Publications Chair
Fritz Lehmann-Grube
X Organization
Web Chair
Sharon Boensch Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Sponsorship Chair
Sabina Jeschke University of Stuttgart, Germany
Conference Coordinator
Gabriella Magyar ICST
Program Committee
Katharina-Maria Behr Hamburg Media School, Germany
Anja Beyer Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany
Julian Dibbell
Sebastian Deterding Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Martin Dodge University of Manchester, UK
Sean Duncan University of Wisoconsin-Madison, USA
David England Liverpool John Moores University, UK
James Grimmelmann New York Law School, USA
Sven Grottke University of Stuttgart, Germany
Shun-Yun Hu National Central University Taiwan
Jesper Juul Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, Singapore
Fritz Lehmann-Grube Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Andreas Lober Schulte Riesenkampff, Lawyers
Claudia Loroff Institut für Innovation und Technik, Germany
Viktor Meyer-Schönberger Harvard University, USA
Claudia Müller University of Stuttgart, Germany
Heike Pethe University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Thomas Richter University of Stuttgart, Germany
Albert 'Skip' Rizzo University of Southern California, USA
Jan Sablatnig Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Uwe Sinha Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Matthew Sorell University of Adelaide, Australia
Marc Swerts Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Anton van den Hengel Australian Centre for Visual Technologies,
Australia
Xiangyu Wang The University of Sydney, Australia
Marc Wilke University of Stuttgart, Germany
Leticia Wilke University of Stuttgart, Germany
Theodor G. Wyeld Flinders University Adelaide, Australia
Tal Zarsky University of Haifa, Israel
Table of Contents
FaVE 2009 – Track 1

Development of Virtual Geographic Environments and Geography
Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Fengru Huang, Hui Lin, and Bin Chen
Dual Reality: Merging the Real and Virtual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Joshua Lifton and Joseph A. Paradiso
Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform:

The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) . . . . . . . . . . 29
S. George Djorgovski, Piet Hut, Steve McMillan, Enrico Vesperini,
Rob Knop, Will Farr, and Matthew J. Graham

Characterizing Mobility and Contact Networks in Virtual Worlds . . . . . . 44
Felipe Machado, Matheus Santos, Virgı́lio Almeida, and
Dorgival Guedes
Landmarks and Time-Pressure in Virtual Navigation: Towards

Designing Gender-Neutral Virtual Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Elena Gavrielidou and Maarten H. Lamers
The Effects of Virtual Weather on Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Bartholomäus Wissmath, David Weibel, and Fred W. Mast

Complexity of Virtual Worlds’ Terms of Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Holger M. Kienle, Andreas Lober, Crina A. Vasiliu, and
Hausi A. Müller
The Role of Semantics in Next-Generation Online Virtual World-Based

Retail Store . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Geetika Sharma, C. Anantaram, and Hiranmay Ghosh
StellarSim: A Plug-In Architecture for Scientific Visualizations in

Virtual Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Amy Henckel and Cristina V. Lopes
XII Table of Contents

Formalizing and Promoting Collaboration in 3D Virtual Environments
– A Blueprint for the Creation of Group Interaction Patterns . . . . . . . . . . 121
Andreas Schmeil and Martin J. Eppler
Conceptual Design Scheme for Virtual Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Gino Brunetti and Rocco Servidio
Usability Issues of an Augmented Virtuality Environment for Design . . . 151

Xiangyu Wang and Irene Rui Chen

The Managed Hearthstone: Labor and Emotional Work in the Online
Community of World of Warcraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Andras Lukacs, David G. Embrick, and Talmadge Wright
Human Rights and Private Ordering in Virtual Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

Olivier Oosterbaan
Investigating the Concept of Consumers as Producers in Virtual

Worlds: Looking through Social, Technical, Economic, and Legal
Lenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Holger M. Kienle, Andreas Lober, Crina A. Vasiliu, and
Hausi A. Müller
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Development of Virtual Geographic Environments and
Geography Research
Fengru Huang1, Hui Lin1, and Bin Chen2

1
Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong,
Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong
2
Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, Peking University,
Beijing, China
{huangfengru,huilin}@cuhk.edu.hk, gischen@pku.edu.cn
Abstract. Geographic environment is a combination of natural and cultural en-

vironments under which humans survive. Virtual Geographic Environment
(VGE) is a new multi-disciplinary initiative that links geosciences, geographic
information sciences and information technologies. A VGE is a virtual repre-
sentation of the natural world that enables a person to explore and interact with
vast amounts of natural and cultural information on the physical and cultural
environment in cyberspace. Virtual Geography and Experimental Geography
are the two closest fields that associate with the development of VGE from the
perspective of geography. This paper discusses the background of VGE, intro-
duces its research progress, and addresses key issues of VGE research and the
significance for geography research from Experimental Geography and Virtual
Geography. VGE can be an extended research object for the research of Virtual
Geography and enrich the contents of future geography, while VGE can also be
an extended research method for Experimental Geography that geographers can
operate virtual geographic experiments based on VGE platforms.
Keywords: Virtual Environment, Virtual Geography, Experimental Geography,

Virtual Geographic Experiment.
1 Introduction
Geographic environment is a combination of natural and cultural environments under
which humans survive, and traditional geography takes geographic environments in
the real world as its study object. Geography aims to study the physical, chemical,
biological and human processes of the geographic environment (the earth surface
system), analyze the relationships between the interfaces of each geo-spheres, and
interaction mechanisms between various natural and human processes, thus to explore
the precepts of coordinative and sustainable development of resources, environments
and human activities.
As the development of information technologies such as Internet, Web and Virtual
Reality goes further, both new opportunities and challenges are generated for the
development of geographic information sciences and technologies, as well as for
geography sciences. Virtual Geographic Environment (VGE) was first proposed in
F. Lehmann-Grube and J. Sablatnig (Eds.): FaVE 2009, LNICST 33, pp. 1–11, 2010.
© Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010
2 F. Huang, H. Lin, and B. Chen
early 2000 by geography and geographic information science researchers [1, 2, 3, 4].
VGE is a new multi-disciplinary initiative that links geosciences, geographic informa-
tion sciences and information technologies. A VGE is a virtual representation of the
natural world that enables a person to explore and interact with vast amounts of natu-
ral and cultural information on the physical and cultural environment, in cyberspace.
From the perspective of geography, VGE is an environment concerned with the rela-
tionship between avatar-based humans and 3-dimension (3D) virtual worlds. From the
perspective of information systems, VGE is an advanced information system that
combines GIS (Geographic Information System) with VR technology [1, 2, 3]. At
present, there has launched much research into VGE theory, technology and applica-
tions [5, 6, 7, 8]. Those works focus on different aspects of VGE research and thus
raise broader and more complicated research such as topics on geo-data, geo-models,
geosciences knowledge acquisition, GeoComputation, geo-visualization, geo-
collaboration, interaction mode, virtual geographic experiments and Virtual Geogra-
phy. To address this, this paper aims to discuss the background of VGE, introduce its
research progress, and address key issues on VGE research and the significance for
geography research from the perspectives of Experimental Geography and Virtual
Geography.
This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we discuss background and re-
search progress of VGE, as well as its research contents and key issues. In section 3,
we present revolution of geography research method and geographic language. Sec-
tion 4 and Section 5 discuss development of Virtual Geography and development of
Experimental Geography, respectively. Section 6 contains some final discussion and
remarks on VGE and geography research.
2 Background and Research Progress of VGE
2.1 What Is VGE?
VGE was first proposed as a concept of a virtual world that was referenced to the real
world, which had five types of space, namely Internet space, data space, 3D graphical
space, personal perceptual and cognitive space, and social space [2]. To this concept
regard, there are three stages in the evolutionary process of a VGE: virtual crowds,
virtual villages and virtual cities. In this sense, VGE research focuses on the differ-
ences and extension of life content and life style from the real world to virtual worlds,
or between the real world and a virtual world, and thus relate to research of Virtual
Geography or other terms alike. To make emphasis on representation of geographic
process and phenomena in the real world, such as visualization and simulation of geo-
modals in diverse geosciences, the concept of VGE has been supplemented as a new
generation of information platform that can be used for geo-phenomena representa-
tion and simulation, and geo-knowledge publishing and sharing [9]. Such a VGE
represents an ideal interface of geo-information scientists for geographic representa-
tion and research, that is ‘immersive experience and beyond the understanding of
reality’. VGE systems have five characteristics:
Development of Virtual Geographic Environments and Geography Research 3
1, Integrated management and interoperation on geo-models and GIS data;

2, Multi-dimension geo-visualization, including visualization of geometric models
(represent static objects) and geo-models (represent dynamic geographic processes);
3, Immersive virtual interaction: users can ‘step’ into the virtual geographic world
and be a part of the environment, thus have an immersive interaction with the virtual
environment.
4, Distributed geo-collaboration: geographic experts from different places/locations
of the real world can carry out professional discussion and decision-making with the
support of VGE platform;
5, Public participation: VGE emphasizes on the role of social public participation,
so the users are not just experts and professional users, but also the general public.
2.2 Why VGE Rising?
The rising of VGE has a profound background that includes not only development of
geographic sciences, but also currently rapid development of computer technology,
information technology and social sciences. The development of VGE is closely re-
lated to the development of Earth System Science and will ultimately serve the re-
search of global environment change and human sustainable development.
1, Earth System Science research needs a new research tool and information plat-
form in which scientific computation and virtual representation are the two important
characteristics, to facilitate simulation and prediction on natural complex phenomena
that can not be experimented in the real world conditions, such as prediction on the
whole cycle of the Earth's atmosphere-ocean, global warming, Earth's crust change,
earthquake occurrence, and human behavior simulation in emergency public accident
or natural disasters, so as to help manage on environmental resources and human
activities to achieve sustainable development.
2, Current rapid development of Earth information technologies provides technical
support for the emergence of VGE. As the development of mathematical scientific
methods (for example, scientific computation, cellular automation, fractal geometry,
fuzzy mathematics, etc), and computer science and technologies (such as computer
communication, networks, databases, distributed computing, artificial intelligence,
human-computer interaction and virtual reality) goes further and is being applied to
geographic science and Earth System Science, there has been continuous development
from different angles in the field of Earth information technologies. This provides
support for the rising and development of VGE, which integrates with Remote Sens-
ing (RS), Global Position System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS),
computer network, virtual reality technology, and other computer technologies.
3, The field of social and cultural sciences require a research platform or a window
like VGE to learn about human development trends in the age of post-modernism.
The style of post-modern society has the basic characteristics as "information age",
"knowledge economy" and "learning society", and has actually penetrated into various
aspects of contemporary human society, quickly and fully. In recent years, geography
research activities and literature have been increasing with regard to the impact of
modern information technology on geography. For example, Batty [10, 8] proposed
"invisible cities", "Cyberspace Geography" and "Virtual Geography" in terms of geo-
graphic space–place, espace, cyberspace, and cyberplace. Increasing public is being
familiar with and a part of virtual environments, virtual earth, or virtual worlds. The
new styles of learning, working and living, such as e-tourism, e-education, e-
shopping, virtual communities, virtual office, virtual banking, virtual stock market,
virtual games, and virtual art appear in succession and show a strong vitality, and may
represent human development trends and directions in the post-modern age. There-
fore, from the perspective of social scientists who study socio-economic, political,
legal, cultural, and human psychology, behavior and life styles of the post-modern
age, something like VGE as a research window is needed to help to explore character-
istics and development trends of human society of the post-modern age.
2.3 Related Work
VGE is developed with the support of the advancement in computer science and tech-
nologies, geosciences, Geographic Information science and techniques. Only by com-
bination of those theories and technologies to construct an integrated platform can we
meet the need of the development of Earth System Science for global environmental
change and sustainable development research. In recent years, much progress has
been made on such a next-generation geographic information platform from different
aspects. Chinese scholars have been engaging actively in relevant research since VGE
was put forward a decade ago. Lin and Gong explored basic theory, technology and
application of VGE through a series of academic work and papers [1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11].
Tang et al. studied on visual geographic modeling and construction of VGE [12].
Researchers in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) of The University of
Illinois have focused on the development of tools, techniques and hardware to support
real-time and highly interactive visualization [13], and the platform GeoWall [14] was
developed with the characteristics of users’ immersive interaction with the virtual
environment which was displayed to the big screen. MacEachren developed a system
named Dialogue Assisted Visual Environment for Geoinformation (DAVE_G), in
which the earlier multi-modal interface framework and two test-bed implementations:
iMap and XISM [15] were built on and extended. Batty, M. established virtual city
and explored Virtual Geography [8, 10, 16]. Yano built Virtual Kyoto through 4D-
GIS and Virtual Reality to show social customs and traditional culture in Japan [17].
Google, Microsoft, Linden Lab and other companies started to build community,
city, region, or even global 3D virtual environments. Google developed Google Earth
for public searching the high resolution digital map freely [18], and Google SketchUp
[19] for 3D models building. Microsoft launched Virtual Earth project, which was
built up by using photos and offered a higher sense of reality [20]. Linden Lab created
and opened Second Life® to the public since 2003, and now it owns the largest
amount of virtual residents and many kinds of applications such as virtual meeting,
virtual class, virtual industry, etc., in its virtual world [21]. As one of the approaches
of VGE application construction, some GIS-based multi-user virtual environment
applications are being carrying out based on virtual world platforms such as Second
Life®, OpenSimulator [22] or other similar projects. We can therefore see that, as a
new generation of geographic information platform, VGE development has a broad
prospect for geography research.
2.4 Research Contents and Key Issues of VGE
In contrast to current data-centered GIS, a VGE is a human-centered environment. A

VGE system can present immersive multi-dimension visualization, support multi-user
collaborative work, and provide a natural way of perception and interaction between
avatars or users, or between users and virtual environments. Thus, VGE can be an
integrative innovation and its research contents may involve multi-discipline issues,
such as geo-modeling, geographic simulation, GeoComputation, geo-visualization,
computer network, geo-collaboration and interaction, geo-knowledge discovery and
sharing, and virtual geographic experiments. Those are as well as the key issues of
VGE research. On the other hand, VGE extends the research range of traditional ge-
ography with virtual extended geographic environments. Thus, the research contents
of geography extend from place and space of real geographic environment to place-
space and relationship in virtual environments or interaction between those two. This
paper will discuss further on two extended research fields: Virtual Geography and
Experimental Geography in the subsequent sections.
3 Revolution of Geography Research Methods and Geographic

Languages
There has always been a thread of research thoughts of "Pattern - Structure - Proc-
ess -Mechanism" throughout geography studies. However, the research methods in
traditional physical geography are mostly field-site inspection and the use of maps
and data analysis. Geographer Baranshiy once said, "Map is the second language of
geography". Using maps for thinking and analyzing is the most important research
method that makes geography different from other subjects. Development of GIS is
based on a combination of map, mathematical methods, and modern information
technologies. To date, GIS has become the most common carrier and platform of
geographic information. Chen argued "GIS is the third-generation language of
geography" [23].
Along with constant improvement of ability and means to access digital spatial
data and expansion of GIS applications, limitation of traditional GIS (map-centered
and data-driven mechanism) has hindered the development of new methods in the
field of geographic information representation and services. Virtual reality technology
can be used as an immersive human-computer interface for 3D visualization, collabo-
rative work and group decision making through integration with traditional GIS and
3D GIS. Thus, development of VGE can be seen as a higher level of GIS that inte-
grates traditional GIS, virtual reality, network technology, geo-models, human-
computer interaction technology, and systematic methods. Lin argued VGE can be a
new generation of geographic language in that VGE had the ability of abstract expres-
sion of multi-dimensional, multi-viewpoint, multiple details of multi-model visualiza-
tion, supporting for a variety of natural interaction and multi-spatial cognition [4, 11].
Fig. 1 shows the developing process from map and GIS to VGE.
Field Survey and Mapping

Geographic Science
Mathematical Methods
Map Earth System Science
Computer Technologies Digitization
GIS Map
Systematic Methods
2D GIS
Network Virtual
Technology GIS visualization Reality
(2D->2.5D)
Geo-informatic Tupu
Virtual Map
Geo-spatial Cognition
Network Based GIS 3D Virtual GIS Geo-graphical Thinking
Geo-Knowledge Reasoning
……
Collaborative Distributed Computing
Information Sysem Grid Computing
Distributed Collaborative 3D Virtual GIS
Geographic Models and

Geometry Spatial
Database Integration
VGE
Fig. 1. Process from map and GIS to VGE
4 Development of Virtual Geography
4.1 VGE Extends Geographic Environment in the Real World
Geography is the science of place and space [24]. Traditional geography focuses on
place and space of geographic environment in the real world. However, information
science and technology provide open and distributed environments like VGE in the
Internet or in other cyberspace. In those information worlds, the importance of geo-
graphic distance and place has gradually decreased [2]. Online communities or virtual
companies exist in cyberspace with virtual places in virtual environments, but with
their locations at “elsewhere” or even nowhere in the real world. Thus, space-place
becomes virtual space-place and this leads to a deep thinking and wide discussion for
geographers in the context of future geography [25, 26, 27, 28]. Geography Research
has extended from traditional geographic environment to virtual geographic environ-
ments that Virtual Geography focuses on.
4.2 Virtual Geography
Virtual geography, cyber geography, and imagine geography are all the similar terms
in the present literatures that show the impacts of modern technology on geography
[2]. Batty proposed virtual geography and focused on the relationship and interaction
between cyberspace and the real world, and argued that the boundary between space
and place in cyberspace turned blurred, while Crang et al. examined virtual geography
mainly from the aspect of complicated social relationships in virtual environments.
Lin and Gong [1, 2] argued that virtual geography was a new dimension of geogra-
phy studying the characteristics and laws involving VGE, and the relationship and
interaction between VGE and real geographic environments. In comparison to tradi-
tional geography, research contents of this new initiative of geography may include:
1, cybercartography: this is to study the principles and methodology of cyber-
mapping.
2, Development, planning and building of 3D virtual worlds.
3, Spatial perception, cognition and behavior of post-human in 3D virtual envi-
ronments.
4, Issues in the evolution process of VGE, such as boundary and relationship
among various 3D virtual worlds, mechanism of driving forces of evolution of VGE,
etc.
5, Relationship and interaction between VGE and real geographic environments
in population, landscape, social, political, and economic structures.
5 Development of Experimental Geography
5.1 Experimental Geography
Experiment is an important feature as well as a symbol of development of modern

science. That means a scientific experiment can be repeated and be verified. Experi-
ence, observation, practice, and experiment are of great importance in geography
research. From 1950-1960, Chinese geographers have come to realize the importance
of experiments for scientific theories and methods of geography development. Huang
Bingwei, a modern Geography pioneer of China, pointed out that, the old methods
such as empirical and descriptive study in geography research were inanimate, and
Experimental Geography was a major development direction of the forward-looking
geography [29].
Experimental Geography applies specific experimental ideas, experimental meth-
ods, observation equipments and instruments to learn about the spatial structure, time
series, human-earth relationship of geographic environment, discover the basic law of
geography information accumulation and provide evidence to form a measurable,
comparable, controllable geographic system. Therefore, experimental design and
experimental execution theories and methods together constitute the research contents
of Experimental Geography. The purpose of all experimental work is to identify geo-
graphical relations through accessing geographic information by the means of an
extension of human senses.
Traditional methods used in Experimental Geography include field experiments

and indoor physical modeling and experiments. However, those traditional experi-
mental methods show much limitation when its processed object, geographic
system, is a complex giant system with geographic issues of multi-dimension,
multi-scale, ambiguity and uncertainty. At present, geographic mathematical model-
ing, remote sensing information modeling and computer simulation calculation and
experimental methods are various and complicated, thus, an organic integration of
those modern methods from the perspective of Experimental Geography is needed
to be achieved.
5.2 Virtual Geographic Experiments for Experimental Geography
Virtual experiments are defined as digital and virtual environments to carry out
scientific experiments with the support of computer and network technologies. As
development of information technology and simulation technology goes further,
currently, virtual experiments are applied to a large number of research areas, in-
cluding biology, chemistry, physics, human motion, and manufacturing, and has
become a hot issue in those research fields. However, virtual experiment applica-
tions in geosciences are relatively few due to the giant system and highly complex
nature of geographic environment. In recent years, as development of VGE and
related research that has been carried out, as well as learning from virtual experi-
ment applications in experimental economics, experimental medicine and other
areas, virtual geographic experiment has gradually formed a new direction of
research methods for Experimental Geography.
5.3 VGE as a Virtual Geographic Experiment Platform
We argue that VGE, a virtual geographic world, can be a virtual laboratory in which
Virtual Geographic Experiment can be carried out. Virtual Geographic experiment
aims to establish and visualize geographic models to verify and represent geographic
phenomena and processes by calculation, simulation, visualization, real-time human
participation, interaction and manipulation based on geosciences data. It may corre-
spond to geographic positioning field experiments, or indoor physical modeling ex-
periments. It may also be some virtually constructed experiments based on specific
geographic features, phenomena and laws that are difficult to be carried out as physi-
cal experiments in the real world. Virtual Geographic Experiment can be widely used
not only in traditional experimental geography focused research areas of physical
geography, but also in economic geography and human geography as a major research
method.
With the support of such an integration platform of interactive and collaborative
work and geographic experimental environment provided by VGE, geographers can
analyze the represented geographic phenomena and processes and carry out joint
research, knowledge discovery, communication and decision-making in its immersive
way. Thus, VGE extends the research methods of Experimental Geography (Fig. 2).
Virtual Geographic
Methods of Experimental Geography Environment
Virtual geographic experiment

Field investigate
Geo-knowledge discovery
Field observation and survey and sharing
Geo-collaboration and
interaction
Computer simulation
experiment Multi-D geo-visualization
Interior experiment and
analysis Remote sensing
Geo-system Simulation
information modeling
Interior physical simulation Scientific geo-computation
experiment Mathematical
Geographic Modeling Geo-modeling
Fig. 2. VGE extends the research methods of Experimental Geography
6 Discussion and Conclusion
In recent years, multi-user virtual environments have come into widespread use on the
Internet. Virtual environment technologies and virtual world platforms (e.g. the clas-
sical virtual world "Second Life"®) are used not only for games but also for various
non-game purpose applications [30]. Moreover, Roush argued that the World Wide
Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an immersive, 3D visual
environment combining elements of social virtual worlds ( e.g. Second Life®) and
mapping applications (e.g. Google Earth), and what’s coming is a larger digital envi-
ronment-a 3D Internet [31]. Many relevant issues are being developed or need to be
developed to explore both on theory, technology and various applications on those
subjects. VGE combines elements of all these technologies and research on relevant
frontier issues from the perspective of geography. However, current VGE research
focuses more on geometry modeling and visualization or realistic representation that
inherits and extends from 2D GIS functionalities, there are limitations with VGE but
are important aspects of VGE are dynamic geographic processes modeling and visu-
alization, geo-collaboration, interaction under a 3D virtual environments that support
for the capability of people to better understand the real geographic environment.
Virtual Geography and Experimental Geography are two closest fields that associ-
ate with the development of VGE. Virtual Geography has VGEs as its research object
and extend geographic issues from traditional geographic environment to virtual envi-
ronments and the spaces, places, avatars, and all the other elements and relations in it.
Experimental Geography might have VGE as a new medium to establish virtual ex-
periments on geographic processes with a way of immersive visualization, geo-
collaboration and natural interaction. Development of VGE represents a new field in
geographic information and geographic research in the coming 3D Internet age. Much
work should be developed from different aspects of this new field.
Acknowledgements
This research is partially supported by The National “863”High Technology Research
and Development Program of China (No. 2006AA12Z207, 2007AA120502), and
Direct Grant from CUHK (No. 2020967). We would also like to thank the three
anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions on previous version of this paper.
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Dual Reality: Merging the Real and Virtual
Joshua Lifton and Joseph A. Paradiso
MIT Media Lab
Abstract. This paper proposes the convergence of sensor networks and

virtual worlds not only as a possible solution to their respective limi-
tations, but also as the beginning of a new creative medium. In such
a “dual reality,” both real and virtual worlds are complete unto them-
selves, but also enhanced by the ability to mutually reflect, influence,
and merge by means of sensor/actuator networks deeply embedded in
everyday environments. This paper describes a full implementation of a
dual reality system using a popular online virtual world and a human-
centric sensor network designed around a common electrical power strip.
Example applications (e.g., browsing sensor networks in online virtual
worlds), interaction techniques, and design strategies for the dual reality
domain are demonstrated and discussed.
Keywords: dual reality, virtual worlds, sensor network.
1 Introduction
At the heart of this paper is the concept of “dual reality,” which is defined as an
environment resulting from the interplay between the real world and the virtual
world, as mediated by networks of sensors and actuators. While both worlds are
complete unto themselves, they are also enriched by their ability to mutually
reflect, influence, and merge into one another. The dual reality concept, in turn,
incorporates two key ideas – that data streams from real-world sensor networks
are the raw materials that will fuel creative representations via interactive media
that will be commonly experienced, and that online 3D virtual worlds are an ideal
venue for the manifestation and interactive browsing of the content generated
from such sensor data streams.
In essence, sensor networks will turn the physical world into a palette, virtual
worlds will provide the canvas on which the palette is used, and the mappings
between the two are what will make their combination, dual reality, an art rather
than an exact science. Of course, dual reality media will complement rather than
replace other forms of media. Indeed, the end product, that which can be con-
sumed and shared, is unlikely to outwardly resemble current forms of media, even
if it is just as varied. Browsing the real world in a metaphorical virtual universe
driven by a ubiquitous sensor network and unconstrained by physical boundaries
approaches the concept of a digital “omniscience,” where users can fluidly ex-
plore phenomena at different locations and scales, perhaps also interacting with
reality through distributed displays and actuators. Indeed, a complete consider-
ation of dual reality must also include the possibility of “sensor” data from the

c Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010
Dual Reality: Merging the Real and Virtual 13
Fig. 1. An environmental taxonomy as viewed on the real-virtual axis (left). Sensor

networks seamlessly merge real and virtual to form dual reality (right).
virtual world embodied in the real world. Insofar as technically feasible, dual
reality is bi-directional – just as sensed data from the real world can be used to
enrich the virtual world, so too can sensed data from the virtual world be used
to enrich the real world.
Of the many axes along which various virtual worlds can be compared, the
most relevant for this work is the real-virtual axis, which indicates how much
of the constructed world is real and how much virtual. See Figure 1. A rough
taxonomy can further compartmentalize the real-virtual axis into reality, which
is simply life in the absence of virtual representations of the world; augmented
reality, which has all aspects of reality, as well as an “information prosthetic”
which overlays normally invisible information onto real objects [1,2]; mixed re-
ality, which would be incomplete without both its real and virtual components,
such as the partially built houses made complete with blue screen effects for
use in military training exercises [3]; and virtual reality, which contains only
elements generated by a computer in an attempt to mimic aspects of the real
world, as exemplified in some popular computer games [4]. Contrast this with
the taxonomy given by Milgram and Kishino in [5].
Each of these environments represents what is supposed to be a single, com-
plete, and consistent world, regardless of which components are real or virtual.
Although this taxonomy can be successfully applied to most enhanced reality
efforts, it does not address well the concept of dual reality, which comprises a
complete reality and a complete virtual reality, both of which are enhanced by
their ability to mutually reflect, influence, and merge into each other by means
of deeply embedded sensor/actuator networks. See Figure 1.
2 Background
By their nature, sensor networks augment our ability to understand the phys-
ical world in ways beyond our innate capabilities. With sensor networks and a
record of the data they generate, our senses are expanded in space, time, and
modality. As with previous expansions of our ability to perceive the world, some
of the first and perhaps in the long run most important upshots will be the
stimulation of new creative media as artists working in dual reality strive to
express sensed phenomena into strong virtual experiences. The work described
14 J. Lifton and J.A. Paradiso
here begins to explore directions for such self-expression as it takes shape in the
interplay between sensor networks and virtual worlds.
There is no definition of online virtual worlds that is both agreed upon and
useful. The term itself is vague enough to encompass a full spectrum of tech-
nologies, from text-based multiple user domains (MUDs) originating in the late
1970s [6] to visually immersive online 3D games commercially available today
[7,8]. This work primarily focuses on the concept of virtual world as introduced
in science fiction works by authors such as William Gibson [9] and Neil Stephen-
son [10]. This type of online virtual world is characterized by an immersive 3D
environment, fluid interactions among inhabitants, and some level of ability for
inhabitants to shape their environment. The goal may not be, and probably
should not be, to replicate all aspects of the real world, but rather only those
that facilitate the interaction in a virtual environment. In light of this, imbuing
virtual worlds with the ability to sense aspects of the real world is a technique
with significant potential.
The real world portions of this work use the 35-node Plug sensor network
described in [11,12,13] and reviewed in a later section. The virtual world portions
of this work focus exclusively on Second Life, an online virtual world launched
in 2003 and today still maintained by Linden Lab [14]. A comprehensive review
of all online virtual worlds is beyond the scope of this work and better left to
the several websites that specialize in such comparisons [7,8,15]. Second Life was
chosen because of its technical and other advantages in implementing many of
the dual reality ideas explored here. For a more detailed introduction to Second
Life, see Linden Lab’s official guide book and the Second Life website [16,14].
2.1 Self-expression in Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds today are largely social in nature – people enter these worlds
in order to meet other people and build connections with them through shared
experiences. As in the real world, social interactions in virtual worlds revolve
around self-expression. Taking Second Life as a representative example of the
state-of-the-art in this respect, a resident of Second Life can express herself via
the appearance and name of her avatar, the information revealed in her avatar’s
profile (favorite places, preferences, etc.), her avatar’s scripted or explicitly trig-
gered actions (dancing, laughing, running, etc.), text chat on public channels
(received only by those nearby in the virtual world), text chat on private chan-
nels (received by a user-determined list of people regardless of their location in
the virtual world), and live voice chat using a headset. A typical encounter when
meeting another person for the first time, especially someone new to Second Life,
revolves around explanations of how names and appearances were chosen, elab-
orations of details in avatar profiles, and exhibitions of clothing or animations.
A less explicit although arguably more compelling form of self-expression in
Second Life is the ability to build objects, from necklaces to cars to castles,
and imbue them with a wide range of behaviors. The skill level needed to do
so, however, is on par with that needed to build compelling web sites. As such,
this form of self-expression is limited to a small proportion of the total virtual
world demographic. However, those who can build and script in Second Life can
express themselves to a far wider audience than those who cannot.
Compared to the real world, self-expression in Second Life and other virtual
worlds is limited; missing are rich sources of information taken for granted in
the real world, such as scent, body language, and the telltale signs of daily wear
and tear. It’s not that these sources of information were forgotten, just that they
are difficult to emulate in meaningful ways in the virtual world. For example,
virtual wind causes virtual trees to sway, a virtual sun and moon rise and set
periodically, and virtual clouds form and disperse in Second Life, but there is
no meaning or cause behind any of these phenomena and their effect on the
virtual world is superficial at best. Overall, the demand for richer forms of self-
expression in virtual worlds is apparent. Data collected from real-world sensor
networks can help meet this demand by importing into the virtual world the
inherent expressiveness of the real world.
2.2 The Vacancy Problem

The vacancy problem is the noticeable and profound absence of a person from
one world, either real or virtual, while they are participating in the other. Sim-
ply put, the vacancy problem arises because people do not currently have the
means to be in more than one place (reality) at a time. In the real world, the
vacancy problem takes the form of people appearing completely absorbed in
themselves, ignoring everything else. In the virtual world, the vacancy problem
takes the form of virtual metropolises appearing nearly empty because there are
not enough avatars to fill them. In part, this virtual vacancy is due to tech-
nical barriers preventing large numbers (hundreds) of people from interacting
within the same virtual space. However, the vacancy problem will remain, even
as processor speeds, network bandwidth, and graphics fidelity increase to over-
come these technical difficulties. In a world nearly unconstrained by geography
or physics, the currency of choice is people rather than real estate or possessions.
As of this writing, there are over 10 million registered Second Life accounts,
but only about 50,000 users logged into Second Life at any given time [17],
providing a population density of 10 people per square kilometer (vs. over 18,000
for real-world Manhattan).
The vacancy problem is a fundamental characteristic of today’s virtual worlds.
More closely linking the real world with the virtual world, as the dual reality
concept suggests, can work to mitigate the vacancy problem – just as real cities
require special infrastructure to allow for a high population density, so too will
virtual cities. We can envision people continuously straddling the boundary be-
tween real and virtual through “scalable virtuality”, where they are never truly
offline, as sensor networks and mobile devices serve to maintain a continuous
background inter-world connection (an early exploration of this idea was given
in [18]). This can be tenuous, with virtual avatars passively representing some
idea of the user’s location and activity and the virtual world manifesting into
reality through ambient display, or immersive, with the user fully engaged in
manipulating their virtual presence.
2.3 Mapping between Realities
There are numerous challenges in designing exactly how the real and virtual will
interact and map onto each other. A direct mapping of the real to virtual and
virtual to real may not be the most appropriate. For example, the sensor data
streams collected from a real person may be better mapped to the virtual land
the person’s avatar owns rather than to the avatar itself.
One possible mapping strategy is to shape the virtual world according to our
subjective perceptions of the real world. In essence, the virtual world would be
a reflection of reality distorted to match our mind’s eye impressions as discerned
by a network of sensors. For example, the buildings on a virtual campus could
change in size according to the number of inhabitants and virtual corridors could
widen or lengthen according to their actual throughput.
2.4 Related Work
Work that couples the real world with virtual worlds falls into several broad
categories. There are several efforts to bring a virtual world into the real world
by using positioning and proximity systems to cast real people as the actors
of an otherwise virtual world, such as Human Pacman [19], Pac Manhattan
[20], ARQuake [21], and DynaDOOM [22]. Such work remains almost exclusively
within the realm of converting video games into live action games and, aside from
location awareness, does not incorporate other sensing modalities. Magerkurth
et al. provide a good overview of this genre of pervasive games, as well as other
more sensor-rich but physically confined games [23]. In an attempt to make
Second Life more pervasive in the real world, Comverse has created a limited
Second Life interface for cell phones [24]. Virtual worlds are being used to involve
citizens in the collaborative planning of real urban areas [25], although this
type of system relies more on GIS data than sensor networks embedded in the
environment. More advanced and correspondingly more expensive systems are
used for military training [26]. Most of the systems mentioned above support
only a handful of simultaneous users.
Among efforts to bring the real world into the virtual world, it is standard
practice to stream audio and video from live real events, such as conferences and
concerts, into Second Life spaces built specifically for those events [27]. More
ambitious and not as readily supported by existing technologies is the IBM UK
Laboratories initiative in which the state of light switches, motorized blinds, the
building’s electricity meter, and the like in a real lab space are directly reflected
and can be controlled in a Second Life replication [28]. Similar efforts on a
smaller scale include a general-purpose control panel that can be manipulated
from both the real world and Second Life [29], and a homebrewed virtual reality
wearable computer made specifically to interface to Second Life [30].
The convergence of Second Life, or something like it, with popular real-world
mapping software to form a “Second Earth” has been broadly predicted [31]. Uses
of such a “hyper reality” include analyzing real-world data (“reality mining”), as
was done in the Economic Weather Map project [32]. Such ideas have appeared
before as interactive art pieces. For example, the Mixed Realities juried art
competition organized by Turbulence (a net art commissioning organization [33])
in collaboration with Ars Virtua (a media center and gallery within Second Life
[34]) recognizes projects that mix various aspects of the real and virtual [35].
Sensor network-enabled dual realities may naturally merge with or evolve from
the life logging work pioneered by Gordon Bell [36,37] and popularized by web
applications such as MySpace [38], Facebook [39], and Twitter [40].
Central to the dual reality concept is the expressive and social intent of the
participants, which separates dual reality from the broader field of information
visualization [41,42]. For example, consider services like Google Maps [43] and
Traffic.com [44], that visualizes traffic congestion in a large metropolitan area.
Traffic information might be gathered from numerous sources, such as cell tow-
ers, arial imagery, or user input, and displayed in a variety of ways, such as on
the web, in a 3D virtual environment, or text messaging. The primary use of
this service is to allow participants to intelligently plan their daily commute. Al-
though hardly social by most standards, this service does form a social feedback
loop; a user of the service will change her route according to the data presented
and in doing so change the nature of the data presented to the next user. How-
ever, the motivation or intent of the service is entirely devoid of self-expression,
and therefore does not readily fall under the rubric of dual reality. Closer to dual
reality is VRcontext’s ProcessLife technology [45], which uses high-fidelity 3D
virtual replicas of real environments to visualize and remotely influence indus-
trial processes in real-time, though the potential for social interaction and rich
metaphor appears low, as does the granularity of the sensor data visualizations.
3 Design and Implementation
3.1 Real World Implementation
This work utilizes the previously developed “Plug” sensor network compris-
ing 35 nodes modeled on a common electrical power outlet strip and designed
specifically for ubiquitous computing environments [11,12,13]. A Plug offers four
standard US electrical outlets, each augmented with a precision transformer for
sensing the electrical current and a digitally controlled switch for quickly turning
the power on or off. The voltage coming into the Plug is also sensed. In addi-
tion to its electrical power sensing and control features, each Plug is equipped
with two LEDs, a push button, small speaker, analog volume knob, piezo vi-
bration sensor, microphone, light sensor, 2.4GHz low-power wireless transceiver,
and USB 2.0 port. An external expansion port features a passive infrared (PIR)
sensor motion sensor, SD removable memory card, and temperature sensor. All
the Plug’s peripherals are monitored and controlled by an Atmel AT91SAM7S64
microcontroller, which is based on the 32-bit ARM7 core, runs at 48MHz, and
comes with 16KB of SRAM and 64KB of internal flash memory. Figure 2 shows
Plug node with and without the external expansion. An extensive library of
modular firmware can be pieced together into applications at compile time.
Fig. 2. A Plug sensor node with (right) and without (left) an external expansion
3.2 Virtual World Implementation

The following sections describe objects or effects in the Second Life virtual world
that were designed as an example of interfacing with the real world through
sensor networks. Everything in Second Life exists as some combination of land,
avatars, objects, and scripts. Land in Second Life is mapped directly to Linden
Lab server resources, such as computing cycles, memory, and bandwidth. Avatars
are the virtual manifestation of real people using Second Life. Objects are built
from one or more primitive three-dimensional solids (“prims”), such as spheres,
cubes, tori, and cones. A script is a program written in the Linden Scripting
Language (LSL) and placed in an object to affect the object’s behavior.
Data Ponds. A single “data pond” is meant to be an easily distinguishable,

locally confined representation of the sensor data from a single Plug node. See
Figure 3. The data pond design consists of a cluster of waving stalks growing
out of a puddle of water and an ethereal foxfire rising from among the stalks, as
might be found in a fantastic swamp. The mapping between a Plug’s sensor data
and its corresponding data pond is easily understood once explained, but still
interesting even without the benefit of the explanation. The particular mapping
used is detailed in Table 1. The data ponds allowed sensed phenomena in the
physical world to be efficiently browsed virtually, and proved effective, for exam-
ple, in seeing at a glance which areas of our lab were more active than others. A
real version of the data pond complements the virtual version. The real version
follows the virtual’s tentacle aesthetic by using a standard desk fan shrouded in
a lightweight, polka dotted sheet of plastic. The air flow through the shroud and
therefore the height, sound, and other idiosyncrasies of the shroud can be finely
controlled by plugging the fan into the outlet of a Plug device and pulse width
modulating the supply voltage accordingly. See Figure 3.
Virtual Sensing. Whereas real sensor networks capture the low-level nuance
of the real world, virtual sensor networks capture the high-level context of the
Fig. 3. A virtual data pond reflects real data near a virtual wall (left) and a real data
pond reflects virtual data near a real wall (right)
Table 1. The mapping from a real-world Plug’s sensor data to its corresponding virtual
data pond
Plug Sensor Data Pond Mapping

Modality Attribute
light stalk length the stalk height is proportional to the maximum
light level over the most recent one-second window
temperature stalk color the color of the stalks varies linearly from blue to
yellow to red from 18◦ C to 29◦ C
motion stalk motion the stalks sway gently when no motion is detected
and excitedly when motion is detected over the
most recent one-second window
sound puddle size the diameter of the water puddle is proportional
to the maximum sound level over the most recent
one-second window
electrical current fire intensity the height and intensity of the fire is proportional
to the total average absolute value of the electrical
current over the most recent one-second window
Fig. 4. Side view of the final implementation of Shadow Lab, which includes data
ponds. A human-sized avatar is standing in the foreground - our particular labspace
is rendered in detail, while the rest of the building was represented by a map. In the
background are buildings belonging to unrelated neighbors.
virtual world. For example, in reality, there are literally an infinite number of
ways a person can touch a table, but in Second Life, there is exactly one. This
work uses embedded and wearable virtual sensing schemes. The embedded sens-
ing scheme entails seeding every object of interest in the virtual environment
to be sensed with a script that detects when an avatar touches or otherwise
interacts with the object and then reports back to a server external to Second
Life with a full description of the interaction, including avatar position, speed,
rotation, and identity. The wearable sensing scheme requires each avatar in the
region of interest to wear a sensing bracelet. The sensing bracelet reports back to
the same external server every five seconds with a full description of its avatar’s
location, motion, and public channel chat. As incentive for avatars to wear the
sensing bracelet, the bracelet also serves as an access token without which the
avatar will be ejected from the region being sensed.
Shadow Lab. Shadow Lab is a space in Second Life modeled after our real
lab in which the Plug sensor network is deployed and exemplifies our real space
to virtual space mapping. The primary feature of Shadow Lab is the to-scale
two-dimensional floor plan of the third floor of our building. Only a small por-
tion of the entire space is modeled in three dimensions. In part, this is due to
the difficulty and resource drain of modeling everything in three dimensions.
However, it is also a design decision reflecting the difficulty in maneuvering an
avatar in a to-scale three dimensional space, which invariably feels too confining
Fig. 5. Avatar metamorphosis (left to right) as real-world activity increases
due to wide camera angles, quick movements, and the coarseness of the avatar
movement controls in Second Life. Moreover, the two-dimensional design lends
itself more readily to viewing the entire space at once and drawing attention to
what few three-dimensional objects inhabit it. Figure 4 shows the latest version
of Shadow Lab, which consists of the map of the lab, approximately 30 data
ponds positioned on the map according to the positions of their corresponding
Plugs in the real lab, and a video screen displaying a live video stream, when
available, from a next-generation Tricorder [13] device equipped with a camera.
Metamorphosis. The only unintentional body language exhibited in Second

Life is the typing gesture avatars make when the user is typing a chat message,
the slumped over sleeping stance assumed when the user’s mouse and keyboard
have been inactive for a preset amount of time, automatically turning to look at
nearby avatars who have just spoken, and a series of stances randomly triggered
when not otherwise moving, such as hands on hips and a bored slouch. All other
body language and avatar actions must be intentionally chosen by the user.
Clearly, there is room for improvement. Metamorphosis explores mapping real
space to a virtual person. See Figure 5. In this prototype, the avatar begins as
a typical human and transforms into a Lovecraftian alien according to several
parameters drawn from the sensor streams of the Plug sensor network spread
throughout the real building. While this particular example is outlandish and
grotesque, in practice the mapping used in a metamorphosis is arbitrary, which
is exactly its appeal as a method of self-expression – metamorphosis can be
mapped to other arbitrary stimuli and unfold in any fashion.
Virtual Atrium. The translation of our lab’s atrium into Second Life attempts
to retain that which is iconic about the original and at the same time take
advantage of the freedom of the virtual world. See Figure 6. The virtual atrium
is defined by the intersection of two perpendicular walls of tile, one representing
the total activity level of the real world as sensed by the Plug network and the
one representing the total activity of the virtual world as sensed by the virtual
sensing systems mentioned above. The physical extent and color scheme of the
virtual atrium walls change accordingly. Each tile has a blank white front face,
four colored sides, and a black back face. Touching a tile will cause it to flip over,
at which point the black back face comes to the front and changes to reveal a
Fig. 6. The real lab atrium (left) and the virtual version (right). A real person and an
avatar show their respective scales.
Fig. 7. Side view of the Ruthenium region
hidden movie or image. All tiles in a given wall share the same image or movie
when flipped, although the exact image or movie displayed is variable.
Dual Reality Open House. At the time of this writing, the state-of-the-art in
large events that bridge the real and virtual worlds amounts to what is essentially
video conferencing between a real auditorium and a virtual auditorium [46]. As a
prototype demonstration of moving beyond this by employing sensor networks,
a dual reality open house was constructed to introduce residents of Second Life
to the lab and visitors of the lab to Second Life. The dual reality open house
premiered at a one-day technical symposium and held in the atrium of our
lab [47]. The real portion of the event consisted of talks and panel discussions
in the building’s main auditorium, interspersed with coffee breaks and stand-
up meals in the atrium among tables manned by lab students demonstrating
various lab projects related to virtual worlds. The virtual portion of the open
house was located in a typical 256-meter by 256-meter region of Second Life [48]
called “Ruthenium.” The server running the Ruthenium region is limited to 40
simultaneous avatars and 15,000 simultaneous prims. In preparation for the open
house, Ruthenium was terraformed and filled with static information kiosks and
live demonstrations of various projects from around the lab. More details about
the projects displayed can be found in [11]. The virtual atrium described in 3.2
framed the space where the virtual portion of our event took place. Data ponds
and an avatar metamorphosis were featured as well. See Figure 7. The entire
Ruthenium region employs the virtual sensing schemes described earlier.
4 Dual Reality Event and Discussion
The dual reality open house described earlier has the potential to explore the
real data and virtual data collection systems. (See [12,11] for more detailed
evaluations of the Plug sensor network.) Sensor data from both the real world
and virtual world were collected during the day-long event. The real-world data
originated from the Plug sensor nodes used throughout the real lab atrium at
the various open house demo stations. Motion, sound, and electrical current
data from a typical Plug are shown in Figure 8. Also collected but not shown
here are data for each Plug’s light, voltage, vibration, and temperature sensors.
The virtual-world data originated from the virtual sensing system previously
detailed as deployed throughout the virtual portion of the dual reality open
house described earlier. Such an extensive data set from a single event spread
across both real and virtual worlds had not previously been collected.
By the nature of the event and its presentation in each world, very little
correlation between the real and virtual data was expected. However, each data
set does speak to how people interact within each world separately and what
the possibilities are for using data from one world in the other. The real-world
sound and motion data shown in Figure 8 clearly follows the structure of the
event as attendees alternate between the atrium during break times and the
auditorium during the conference talks - the auditorium is noisier during breaks,
during which demo equipment was also generally switched on and people are
moving around the demos. On the other hand, the light data (not shown) indicate
physical location more than attendee activity – direct sunlight versus fluorescent
lights versus LCD projector light. See [11] for more detail.
Of the various data collected from the virtual world during the day-long event,
Figure 9 shows the distribution over time of touch events (avatars touching a
virtual object equipped with the virtual embedded sensing system) and avatar
movement events (the virtual wearable sensing system checks if its avatar is mov-
ing approximately once per second) collected from 22 avatars, of which 16 chose
to wear the access bracelet virtual sensing system. Due to a network glitch, data
collected from the virtual sensing system started being logged at approximately
11 AM rather than at 8 AM, when the event actually started. The spike of avatar
movement at around noon is likely due to the pause in the live video stream from
the auditorium when the talks broke for lunch, thus giving avatars watching the
video stream incentive to move to another location to interact with other aspects
of the virtual space. The relatively constant motion thereafter might indicate
the exploratory nature of the participants and/or the space. Of all avatar-object
Fig. 8. Electrical current, sound level, and motion versus time from a typical Plug
node during the dual reality open house
interactions, 83% were between an avatar and a virtual atrium wall tile, that
displayed the live video feed from the real auditorium.
This trial could have been improved in several respects. For example, the num-
ber of virtual attendees could have been increased with better advertising. Also
(and most crucially), a stronger connection between real and virtual premises
could have been made and “connectedness” metrics formulated and tested. These
are being addressed in another dual reality event that we are hosting soon.
4.1 Discussion
In a completely fabricated virtual world, the entropy of a real-world data stream

can dramatically alter the virtual ambiance. Certainly, a cleverly utilized pseudo-
random number generator could do the same, but meaning derives more from
perception than from the underlying mechanism, and it is much easier to weave
a story from real data than from pseudo-random numbers. The act of weaving
a story from sensor data is essentially the act of designing and implementing
a mapping from data to a real or virtual manifestation of the data. A success-
ful story must be meaningful to tell as well as to hear, and using sensor data
grounded in either the real or virtual world helps achieve this. In essence, the
act of creation must be as gratifying as the act of consumption.
The creative aspects of dual reality, the mapping of real or virtual sensor data
to some manifestation, will likely follow the trend of another recent medium –
blogs. While blogs have allowed some creative geniuses an outlet and given them
a wide, appreciative, and well-deserved audience, the quality of most blogs, at
least as a consumptive medium, is far below previous mass media standards.
Of course, their quality as a creative medium and the value they bring to their
creators in that regard far exceed previous standards by virtue of their relatively
low barrier to entry alone. These trends will be exaggerated in the context of
dual reality for two reasons. First, the medium is much richer, involving virtual
3D worlds and complex social interactions and is therefore accessible to a wider
Fig. 9. Avatar movement and interaction during the dual reality open house
audience. Second, once the mapping of data to manifestation is set, the act of
creation is nearly automatic (sitting somewhere between an interactive installa-
tion and a performance) and therefore a wider range of talent will participate. In
short, the worst will be worse and the best will be better, a hallmark of success-
ful mass media. As with other creative media, virtuosity will still play a critical
role in dual reality, namely in the conception, implementation, and honing of
the specific mappings between sensor data and their manifestations. These ideas
are further discussed in [49].
While mapping sensor data to manifestation may be at the highest level of the
dual reality creative process, once the mappings are in place, people can still inten-
tionally express themselves in many ways, depending on the exact nature of the
mapping. The evolution of emoticons in text messages is one example of such ex-
pression using a current technology. Another is the habit of maintaining an active
online presence, such as used in Internet messaging clients, by jogging the com-
puter’s mouse occasionally. In the same way, users of dual reality environments
will modify their behavior so as to express themselves through the medium.
5 Conclusion
Various technologies have fundamentally altered our capacity to consume, share,
and create media. Most notably, television and radio made consumption
widespread and the Internet made sharing widespread. In comparison, creation

of media is still difficult and limited to a small subset of the population. The
promise of dual reality is to use sensor/actuator networks as a generative tool
in the process of transforming our everyday experiences in the real world into
content shared and experienced in the virtual world. Just as the data created
by a movie camera are shared and consumed in a theater, the data collected
from sensor networks will be shared and consumed in virtual worlds. This holds
the potential to revolutionize sensor network browsing, as participants fluidly
explore metaphoric representations of sensor data - similarly, virtual denizens
can manifest into real spaces through display and actuator networks. If sensor
networks are the palette, then virtual worlds are the canvas that usher in a new
form of mass media.
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Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific
Research Platform: The Meta-Institute for
Computational Astrophysics (MICA)
S.G. Djorgovski1,∗, P. Hut2,*, S. McMillan3,*, E. Vesperini3,*,

R. Knop3,*, W. Farr4,*, and M. J. Graham1,*
1
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
2
The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA
3
Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
4
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
george@astro.caltech.edu
Abstract. We describe the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics

(MICA), the first professional scientific organization based exclusively in vir-
tual worlds (VWs). The goals of MICA are to explore the utility of the emerg-
ing VR and VWs technologies for scientific and scholarly work in general, and
to facilitate and accelerate their adoption by the scientific research community.
MICA itself is an experiment in academic and scientific practices enabled by
the immersive VR technologies. We describe the current and planned activities
and research directions of MICA, and offer some thoughts as to what the future
developments in this arena may be.
Keywords: Virtual Worlds; Astrophysics; Education; Scientific Collaboration

and Communication; Data Visualization; Numerical Modeling.
1 Introduction
Immersive virtual reality (VR), currently deployed in the form of on-line virtual
worlds (VWs) is a rapidly developing set of technologies which may become the
standard interface to the informational universe of the Web, and profoundly change
the way humans interact with information constructs and with each other. Just as the
Web and the browser technology has changed the world, and almost every aspect of
modern society, including scientific research, education, and scholarship in general, a
synthesis of the VR and the Web promises to continue this evolutionary process
which intertwines humans and the world of information and knowledge they create.
Yet, the scientific community at large seems to be at best poorly informed (if
aware at all) of this technological emergence, let alone engaged in spearheading the
developments of the new scientific, educational, and scholarly modalities enabled by
these technologies, or even new ideas which may translate back into the better ways
∗
All authors are also associated with the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics
(MICA), http://mica-vw.org
30 S.G. Djorgovski et al.
in which these technologies can be used for practical and commercial applications
outside the world of academia. There has been a slowly growing interest and
engagement of the academic community in the broad area of humanities and social
sciences in this arena (see, e.g., [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], and references therein), but the “hard
sciences” community has barely touched these important and potentially very power-
ful developments. While a few relatively isolated individuals are exploring the poten-
tial uses of VWs as a scholarly platform, the scientific/academic community as a
whole has yet to react to these opportunities in a meaningful way. One reason for this
negligence may be a lack of the real-life examples of the scientific utility of VWs. It
is important to engage the scientific community in serious uses and developments of
immersive VR technologies.
With this growing set of needs and opportunities in mind, following some initial
explorations of the VWs as a scholarly interaction and communication platform [6, 7],
we formed the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) [8] in the
spring of 2008. Here we describe the current status and activities of MICA, and its
long-term goals.
2 The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA)

To the best of our knowledge, MICA is the first professional scientific organization
based entirely in VWs. It is intended to serve as an experimental platform for science
and scholarship in VWs, and it will be the organizing framework for the work pro-
posed here. MICA is currently based in Second Life (SL) [9] (it initially used the VW
of Qwaq [10]), but it will expand and migrate to other VWs and venues as appropri-
ate. The charter goals of MICA are:
1. Exploration, development and promotion of VWs and VR technologies for
professional research in astronomy and related fields.
2. To provide and develop novel social networking venues and mechanisms for
scientific collaboration and communications, including professional meetings,
effective telepresence, etc.
3. Use of VWs and VR technologies for education and public outreach.
4. To act as a forum for exchange of ideas and joint efforts with other scientific
disciplines in promoting these goals for science and scholarship in general.
To this effect, MICA conducts weekly professional seminars, bi-weekly popular lec-
tures, and many other regularly scheduled and occasional professional discussions and
public outreach events, all of them in SL. Professional members of MICA include
scientists (faculty, staff scientists, postdocs, and graduate students), technologists, and
professional educators; about 40 people as of this writing (March 2009). A broader
group of MICA affiliates includes members of the general public interested in learn-
ing about astronomy and science in general; it currently consists of about 100 people
(also as of March 2009). The membership of both groups is growing steadily. We
have been very proactive in engaging both academic community (in real life and in
SL) and general public, in the interests of our stated goals. Both our membership and
activities are global in scope, with participants from all over the world, although a
majority resides in the U.S.
Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform 31
MICA is thus a testbed and a foothold for science and scholarship in VWs, and we
hope to make it both a leadership institution and a center of excellence in this arena,
as well as an effective portal to VWs for the scientific community at large. While our
focus is in astrophysics and related fields, where our professional expertise is, we see
MICA in broader terms, and plan to interact with scientists and educators in other
disciplines as well. We also plan to develop partnerships with the relevant industry
laboratories, and conduct joint efforts in providing innovation in this emerging and
transformative technology.
The practical goals of MICA are two-fold. First, we wish to lead by example, and
demonstrate the utility of VWs and immersive VR environments generally for scien-
tific research in fields other than humanities and social sciences (where we believe the
case is already strong). In that process, we hope to define the “best practices” and
optimal use of VR tools in research and education, including scholarly communica-
tions. This is the kind of activity that we expect will engage a much broader segment
of the academic community in exploration and use of VR technologies. Second, we
hope to develop new research tools and techniques, and help lay the foundations of
the informational environments for the next generation of VR-enabled Web. Specifi-
cally, we are working in the following directions:
2.1 Improving Scientific Collaboration and Communication
Our experience is that an immediate benefit of VWs is as an effective scientific com-

munication and collaboration platform. This includes individual, group, or collabora-
tion meetings, seminars, and even full-scale conferences. You can interact with your
colleagues as if they were in the same room, and yet they may be half way around the
world. This is a technology which will finally make telecommuting viable, as it pro-
vides a key element that was missing from the flat-Web paradigm: the human interac-
tion. We finally have a “virtual water cooler”, the collegial gathering work spaces to
enhance and expand our cyber-workspaces.
VWs are thus a very green technology: you can save your time, your money, and
your planet by not traveling if you don't have to. This works well enough already, at
almost no cost, and it will get better as the interfaces improve, driven by the games
and entertainment industry, if nothing else. This shift to virtual meetings can poten-
tially save millions of dollars of research funding, which could be used for more pro-
ductive purposes than travel to collaboration or committee meetings, or to confer-
ences of any kind.
We have an active program of seminars, lectures, collaboration meetings, and free-
form scholarly discussions within the auspices of MICA, and we are proactive in
informing our real-life academic community about these possibilities. We offer
coaching and mentoring for the novices, and share our experiences on how to best use
immersive VR for scientific communication and collaboration with other researchers.
In addition, starting in a near future, we plan to organize a series of topical work-
shops on various aspects of computational science (both general, and specific to as-
trophysics), as well as broader-base annual conferences on science and scholarship in
VWs, including researchers, technologists, and educators from other disciplines.
These meetings will be either entirely based in VWs (SL to start), or be in “mixed
reality”, with both real-life and virtual environment gatherings simultaneously, con-
nected by streaming media.
Fig. 1. MICA members attending a regular weekly astrophysics seminar, in this case by Dr. M.
Trenti, given in the StellaNova sim in SL. Participants in these meetings are distributed world-
wide, but share a common virtual space in which they interact.
Genuine interdisciplinary cross-fertilization is a much-neglected path to scientific

progress. Given that many of the most important challenges facing us (e.g., the global
climate change, energy, sustainability, etc.) are fundamentally interdisciplinary in
nature, and not reducible to any given scientific discipline (physics, biology, etc.), the
lack of effective and pervasive mechanisms for establishment of inter-, multi-, or
cross-disciplinary interactions is a serious problem which affects us all. One reason
for the pervasive academic inertia in really engaging in true and effective interdisci-
plinary activities is the lack of easy communication venues, intellectual melting pots
where such encounters can occur and flourish.
VWs as scientific interaction environments offer a great new opportunity to foster
interdisciplinary meetings of the minds. They are easy, free, do not require travel,
and the social barriers are very low and easily overcome (the ease and the speed of
striking conversations and friendships is one of the more striking features of VWs).
To this end, we will establish a series of broad-based scientific gatherings, from in-
formal small group discussions, to full-size conferences. We note that once a VR
environment is established, e.g., in a “sim” in SL, the cost (in both time and money)
of organizing conferences is almost negligible, and the easy and instant worldwide
access with no physical travel makes them easy to attend.
Thus, we have developed a dedicated “MICA island” (sim), named StellaNova [11]
within SL. This is intended to be the Institute’s home location in VWs; it is currently
in SL as the most effective and convenient venue, but we will likely expand and mi-
grate to other VW venues when that becomes viable and desirable. StellaNova is used
as a staging area for most of our activities, including meetings, workshops, discus-
sions, etc. It is intended to be a friendly and welcoming virtual environment for schol-
arly collaborations and discussions, very much in the tradition of academe of the
golden age Athens.
A part of our exploration of VWs as scientific communication and collaboration

platforms is an investigation in the mixed use of traditional Web (1.0, 2.0, … 3.0?)
and VR tools; we are interested in optimizing the uses of information technology for
scientific communications generally, and not just exclusively in a VR context, al-
though a VR component would always be present. We plan to evaluate the relative
merits of these technologies for different aspects of professional scientific and schol-
arly interaction and networking – while the Web mechanisms may be better for some
things, VWs may be better for others.
Finally, we intend to investigate the ways in which immersive VR can be used as a
part of scientific publishing, either as an equivalent of the current practice of supple-
menting traditional papers with on-line material on the Web, or even as a primary
publishing medium. Just as the Web offers new possibilities and modalities for schol-
arly publishing which do not simply mimic the age-old printed-paper media publish-
ing, so we may find qualitatively novel uses of VWs as a publishing venue in their
own right. After all, what is important is the content, and not the technical way in
which the information is encoded; and some media are far more effective than others
in conveying particular types of scholarly content.
2.2 A New Approach to Numerical Simulations
Immersive VR environments open some intriguing novel possibilities in the ways in

which scientists can set up, perform, modify, and examine the output of numerical
simulations. In MICA, we use as our primary science environment the gravitational
N-body problem, since that is where our professional expertise is concentrated [12,
13, 14, 15, 16, 17], but we expect that most of the features we develop will find much
broader applicability in the visualization of more general scientific or abstract data
sets. Our goal is to create virtual, collaborative visualization tools for use by compu-
tational scientists working in an arbitrary VW environment, including SL [9],
OpenSim [18], etc. Here we address interactive and immersive visualization in the
numerical modeling and simulations context; we address the more general issues of
data visualization below. For an initial report, see [40].
We started our development of in-world visualization tools by creating scripts to
display a set of related gravitational N-body experiments. The gravitational N-body
problem is easy to state and hard to solve: given the masses, positions, and velocities
of a collection of N bodies moving under the influence of their mutual Newtonian
gravitational interactions, according to the laws of Newtonian mechanics, determine
the bodies' positions and velocities at any subsequent time. In most cases, the motion
has no analytic solution, and must be computed numerically. Both the character of
the motion and the applicable numerical techniques depend on the scale of the system.
Most of the essential features of the few-body problem can be grasped from studies
of the motion of 3-5 body systems, in bound or scattering configurations. The physics
and basic mathematics are elementary, and the required programming is straightfor-
ward. Yet, despite these modest foundations, such systems yield an extraordinarily
rich spectrum of possible outcomes. The idea that simple deterministic systems can
lead to complex, chaotic results is an important paradigm shift in many students' per-
ception of physics. Few-body dynamics is also critically important in the determining
the evolution and appearance of many star clusters, as well as the stability of observed
multiple stellar systems.
These systems are small enough that the entire calculation could be done entirely
within VWs, although we would wish to preserve the option of also importing data
from external sources. This tests the basic capabilities of the visualization system –
updating particles, possibly interpolating their motion, stopping, restarting, running
backwards, resetting to arbitrary times, zooming in and out, etc.
The next level of simulation involves broadening the context of our calculations to
study systems containing several tens of particles, which will allow us to see both the
few-body dynamics and how they affect the parent system. Specifically, the study of
binary interactions and heating, and the response of the larger cluster, will illustrate
the fundamental dynamical processes driving the evolution of most star clusters. We
will study the dynamics of systems containing binary systems, a possible spectrum of
stellar masses, and real (if simplified) stellar properties. These simulations are likely
to lie at the high end of calculations that can be done entirely within the native VW
environments, and much of the data may have to be imported. The capacity to iden-
tify, zoom in on, and follow interesting events, and to change the displayed attributes
of stars on the fly will be key to the visualization experience at this level.
The evolution of very large systems, such as galaxies, is governed mainly by large-
scale gravitational forces rather than by small-scale individual interactions, so studies
of galaxy interactions highlight different physics and entail quite different numerical
algorithms from the previous examples. It will not be feasible to do these calculations
within the current generation of VWs, or to stream in data fast enough to allow for
animation, so the goal in this case will be to import, render, and display a series of
static 3-D frames, which will nevertheless be “live” in the sense that particles of dif-
ferent sorts (stars, gas, dark matter, etc.) or with other user-defined properties can be
identified and highlighted appropriately.
The choice of N ~ 50,000 is small compared to the number of stars in an actual
galaxy, and it is more typical of a large star cluster. However, with suitable algo-
rithms, galaxies can be adequately modeled by simulations on this scale, and this
choice of N is typical of low-resolution calculations of galaxy dynamics, such as
galaxy collisions and mergers, that are often used for pedagogical purposes. It also
represents a compromise in the total amount of data that can be transferred into the
virtual environment in a reasonable time. The intent here will be to allow users to
visualize the often complex 3D geometries of these systems, and to explore some of
their dynamical properties. This visualization effort in this case will depend on effi-
cient two-way exchange of data between the in-world presentation and the external
engine responsible for both the raw data and the computations underlying many as-
pects of the display.
Our first goal is thus to explore the interactive visualization of simulations running
within the VWs computational environments, thus offering better ways to understand
the physics of the simulated processes – essentially the qualitative changes in the
ways scientists would interact with their simulations. Our second goal is to explore
the transition regime where the computation is actually done externally, on a powerful
or specialized machine, but the results are imported into a VW environment, while the
user feedback and control are exported back, and determine the practical guidelines as
to how and when such a transition should be deployed in a real-life numerical study of
astrophysical systems. The insights gained here would presumably be portable to
Fig. 2. A MICA astrophysicist immersed in, and interacting with, a gravitational N-body simu-
lation using the OpenSim environment
other disciplines (e.g., biology, chemistry, other fields of physics, etc.) where numeri-
cal simulations are the only option of modeling of complex systems.
2.3 Immersive Multi-Dimensional Data Visualization
In a more general context, VWs offer intriguing new possibilities for scientific visu-
alization or “visual analytics” [19, 20]. As the size, and especially the complexity of
scientific data sets increase, effective visualization becomes a key need for data
analysis: it is a bridge between the quantitative information contained in complex
scientific measurements, and the human intuition which is necessary for a true under-
standing of the phenomena in question.
Most sciences are now drowning under the exponential growth of data sets, which
are becoming increasingly more complex. For example, in astronomy we now get
most of our data from large digital sky surveys, which may detect billions of sources
and measure hundreds of attributes for each; and then we perform data fusion across
different wavelengths, times, etc., increasing the data complexity even further. Like-
wise, numerical simulations also generate huge, multi-dimensional output, which
must be interpreted and matched to equally large and complex sets of measurements.
Examples include structure formation in the universe, modeling of supernova
explosions, dense stellar systems, etc. This is an even larger problem in biological or
environmental sciences, among others. We note that the same challenges apply to
visualization of data from measurements, numerical simulations, or their combination.
How do we visualize structures (clusters, multivariate correlations, patterns,
anomalies...) present in our data, if they are intrinsically hyper-dimensional? This is
one of the key problems in data-driven science and discovery today. And it is not just
the data, but also complex mathematical or organizational structures or networks,
which can be inherently and essentially multi-dimensional, with complex topologies,
etc. Effective visualization of such complex and highly-dimensional data and theory
structures is a fundamental challenge for the data-driven science of the 21st century,
and these problems will grow ever sharper, as we move from Terascale to Petascale
data sets of ever increasing complexity.
VWs provide an easy, portable venue for pseudo-3D visualization, with various
techniques and tricks to encode more parameter space dimensions, with an added
benefit of being able to interact with the data and with your collaborators. While
there are special facilities like “caves” for 3D data immersion, they usually require a
room, expensive equipment, special goggles, and only one person at a time can bene-
fit from the 3D view. With an immersive VW on your laptop or a desktop, you can
do it for free, and share the experience with as many of your collaborators as you can
squeeze in the data space you are displaying, in a shared, interactive environment.
These are significant practical and conceptual advantages over the traditional
graphics packages, and if VWs become the standard scientific interaction venue as we
expect, then bringing the data to the scientists only makes sense. Immersing our-
selves in our data may help us think differently about them, and about the patterns we
see. With scientists immersed in their data sets, navigating around them, and interact-
ing with both the data and each other, new approaches to data presentation and under-
standing may emerge.
Fig. 3. MICA scientists in an immersive data visualization experiment, developed by D. Enfield

and S.G. Djorgovski. Data from a digital sky survey are represented in a 6-dimensional parame-
ter space (XYZ coordinates, symbol sizes, shapes, and colors).
We have conducted some preliminary investigation of simple multi-dimensional

data visualization scripting tools within SL. We find that we can encode data parame-
ter spaces with up to a dozen dimensions in an interactive, immersive pseudo-3D
display. At this point we run into the ability of the human mind to easily grasp the
informational content thus encoded. A critical task is to experiment further in finding
the specific encoding modalities that maximize our ability to perceive multiple data
dimensions simultaneously, or selectively (e.g., by focusing on what may stand out as
an anomalous pattern).
One technical challenge is the number of data objects that can be displayed in a
particular VW environment; SL is especially limiting in this regard. Our next step is
to experiment with visualizations in custom VW environments, e.g., using OpenSim
[18], which can offer scalable solutions needed for the modern large data sets. How-
ever, even an environment like SL can be used for experimentation with modest-scale
data sets (e.g., up to ~ 104 data objects), and used to develop the methods for an opti-
mal encoding of highly-dimensional information from the viewpoint of human per-
ception and understanding.
Additional questions requiring further research include studies of combined dis-
plays of data density fields, vector fields, and individual data point clouds, and the
ways in which they can be used in the most effective way. This is a matter of opti-
mizing human perception of visually displayed information, a problem we will tackle
in a purely experimental fashion, using VWs as a platform.
The next level of complexity and sophistication comes with introduction of the
time element, i.e., sequential visualization of changing data spaces (an obvious exam-
ple is the output of numerical simulations of gravitational N-body systems, discussed
in the previous section). We are all familiar with digital movies displaying such in-
formation in a 2-D format. What we are talking about here is immersive 3-D data
cinematography, a novel concept, and probably a key to a true virtualization of
scientific research. Learning how to explore dynamical data sets in this way may lead
to some powerful new ways in which we extract knowledge and understanding from
our data sets and simulations.
Implementing such data visualization environment poses a number of technical
challenges. We plan experiment with interfacing of the existing visualization tools
and packages with VW platforms: effectively, importing the pseudo-3D visualization
signal into VWs, but with a goal of embedding the user avatar in the displayed space.
We may be able to adopt some emergent solutions of this problem from the games or
entertainment industry, should any come up. Alternatively, we may attempt to encode
a modest-scale prototype system within the VW computational environments them-
selves. A hybrid approach may be also possible.
2.4 Exploring the OpenGrid and OpenSim Technologies
Most of the currently open VWs are based on proprietary software architectures, for-
mats, or languages, and do not interoperate with each other; they are closed worlds,
and thus probably dead ends. OpenSimulator (or OpenSim) [18] is a VW equivalent
of the open source software movement. It is an open-source C# program which im-
plements the SL VW server protocol, and which can be used to create a 3-D VW, and
includes facilities for creating custom avatars, chatting with others in the VR envi-
ronment, building 3-D content and creating complex 3-D applications in VW. It can
also be extended via loadable modules or Web service interfaces to build more cus-
tom 3-D applications. OpenSim is released under a BSD license, making it both open
source, and commercially friendly to embed in products.
To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we have conducted some prelimi-
nary experiments in the uses of OpenSim for astrophysical N-body simulations, using
a plugin, MICAsim [21, 22]. We have modified the standard OpenSim physics engine
as a plugin, to run gravitational N-body experiments in this VW environment. We
found that it's practical to run about 30 bodies in a gravitational cold-collapse model
with force softening to avoid hard binary interactions in the simulator, where a few
simulator seconds corresponds to a crossing time. We believe that we could get an-
other factor of two in N from code optimizations in this setting.
We will continue to explore actively the use of OpenSim for our work, and in par-
ticular in the arena or numerical simulations and visualization, and pay a close atten-
tion to the issues of avatar and inventory interoperability and portability. A start
along these lines is ScienceSim [23]. Having an immersive VR environment on one’s
own machine can bypass many of the limitations of the commercial VW grids, such
as SL, especially in the numbers of data points that can be rendered.
It is likely that the convergence of the Web and immersive VR would be in the
form whereby one runs and manages their own VR environment in a way which is
analogous to hosting and managing one’s own website today. OpenSim and its suc-
cessors, along with a suitable standardization for interoperability, may provide a prac-
tical way forward; see also [24].
2.5 Information Architectures for the Next Generation Web
One plausible vision of the future is that there will be a synthesis of the Web, with its
all-encompassing informational content, and the immersive VR as an interface to it,
since it is so well suited to the human sensory input mechanisms. One can think of
immersive VR as the next generation browser technology, which will be as qualita-
tively different from the current, flat desktop and web page paradigm, as the current
browsers were different from the older, terminal screen and file directory paradigm
for information display and access. A question then naturally arises: what will be the
newly enabled ways of interacting with the informational content of the Web, and
how should we structure and architect the information so that it is optimally displayed
and searched under the new paradigm?
To this effect, what we plan to do is to investigate the ways in which large scien-
tific databases and connections between them (e.g., in federated data grid frameworks,
such as the Virtual Observatory [25, 26, 27]) can be optimally rendered in an immer-
sive VR environment. This is of course a universal challenge, common to all sciences
and indeed any informational holdings on the Web, beyond academia.
Looking further ahead, many of the new scientific challenges and opportunities
will be driven by the continuing exponential growth of data volumes, with the typical
doubling times of ~ 1.5 years, driven by the Moore’s law which characterizes the
technology which produces the data [35, 36]. An even greater set of challenges is
presented by the growth of data complexity, especially as we are heading into the
Petascale regime [37, 38, 39]. However, these issues are not limited to science: the
growth of the Web constantly overwhelms the power of our search technologies, and
brute-force approaches seldom work.
Processing, storing, searching, and synthesizing data will require a scalable envi-
ronment and approach, growing from the current “Cloud+Client” paradigm. Only by
merging data and compute systems into a truly global or Web-scale environment –
virtualizing the virtual – will sufficient computational and data storage capacity be
available. A strong feature of such an environment will be high volume, frequent, low
latency services built on message-oriented architectures as opposed to today’s service-
oriented architectures. There will be a heterogeneity of structured, semi-structured and
unstructured data that will need to be persisted in an easily searchable manner. Atop of
that, we will likely see a strong growth in semantic web technologies.
This changing landscape of data growth and intelligent data discovery poses a slew
of new challenges: we will need some qualitatively new and different ways of visual-
izing data spaces, data structures, and search results (here by “data” we mean any
kind of informational objects – numerical, textual, images, video, etc.). Immersive
VR may become a critical technology to confront these issues.
Scientists will have to be increasingly immersed into their data and simulations, as
well as the broader informational environment, i.e., the next generation Web, what-
ever its technological implementations are, simply for the sake of efficiency. How-
ever, the exponential growth of data volumes, diversity, and complexity already
overwhelms the processing capacity of a single human mind, and it is inevitable that
we will need some capable AI tools to aid us in exploring and understanding the data
and the output of numerical models and simulations.
Much of the data discovery and data analysis may be managed by intelligent agents
residing in the computing/data environment, that have been programmed with our
beliefs, desires and intents. They will serve both as proxies for us reacting to results
and new data according to programmed criteria expressed in declarative logic
languages and also as our interface point into the computing/data environment for
activities such as data visualization. Interacting with an agent will be a fully immer-
sive experience combining elements of social networking with advances in virtual
world software.
Thus, we see a possible diversification of the concept of avatars – as they blend
with intelligent software agents, possibly leading to new modalities of human and AI
representation in virtual environments. Humans create technology, and technology
changes us and our culture in unexpected ways; immersive VR represents an excellent
example of an enabling cognitive technology [28, 29].
2.6 Education and Public Outreach
VWs are becoming another empowering, world-flattening educational technology,

very much like as the Web has already done. Anyone from anywhere could attend a
lecture in SL, whether they are a student or simply a science enthusiast. What VWs
provide, extending the Web, is the human presence and interaction, which is an essen-
tial component of an effective learning process. That is what makes VWs such a
powerful platform for any and all educational activities which involve direct human
interactions (e.g., lectures, discussions, tutoring, etc.). In that, they complement and
surpass the traditional Web, which is essentially a medium to convey pre-recorded
lectures, as text, video, slides, etc.
Beyond the direct mappings of traditional lecture formats, VWs can really enable
novel collaborative learning and educational interactions. Since buildings, scenery,
and props are cheap and easy to create, VWs are a great environment for situational
training, exploration of scenarios, and such. Medical students can dissect virtual ca-
davers, and architects can play with innovative building designs, just moving the bits,
without disturbing any atoms. Likewise, physicists can construct virtual replicas of an
experimental apparatus, which students can examine, assemble, or take apart.
There is already a vibrant, active community of educators in SL [30, 31], and many
excellent outreach efforts are concentrated in the SL SciLands virtual continent [32].
MICA’s own efforts include a well-attended series of popular talks, “Dr.Knop talks
astronomy” [33], which includes guest lecturers, as well as informal weekly “Ask an
Astronomer” gatherings. We will continue with these efforts, and expand the range of
our popular lectures.
Under the auspices of MICA, we are starting to experiment with regularly sched-
uled classes and/or class discussions in SL, and we will explore such activities in
other VW environments as well. These may include an introductory astronomy class,
or an advanced topic seminar aimed at graduate students. We will also try a hybrid
format, where the students would read the lecture materials on their own, and use the
class time for an open discussion and explanations of difficult concepts in a VW set-
ting. We also plan to conduct a series of international “summer schools” on the topics
of numerical stellar dynamics, computational science, and possibly others, in an im-
mersive and interactive VW venue.
3 Concluding Comments
In MICA, we have started to build a new type of a scientific institution, dedicated to

an exploration of immersive VR and VWs technologies for science, scholarship, and
education, aimed primarily at academics in physical and other natural sciences.

MICA itself is an experiment in the new ways of conducting scholarly work, as well
as a testbed for new ideas and research modalities. It is also intended to be a gateway
for other scholars, new to VWs, to start to explore the potential and the practical uses
of these technologies in an easy, welcoming, and collegial environment.
MICA represents a multi-faceted effort aimed to develop new modalities of scien-
tific research and communication using new technologies of immersive VR and VWs.
We believe that they will enable and open qualitatively new ways in which scientists
interact among themselves, with their data, and with their numerical simulations, and
thus foster some genuine new “computational thinking” [34] approaches to science
and scholarship.
We use the VWs as a platform to conduct rigorous research activities in the fields
of computational astrophysics and data-intensive astronomy, seeking to determine the
potential of these new technologies, as well as to develop a new set of best practices
for scholarly and research activities enabled by them, and by a combination of the
existing Web-based and the new VR technologies. In that process, we may facilitate
new astrophysical discoveries. We also hope to generate new ideas and methods
which will in turn stimulate development of new technological capabilities in immer-
sive VR and VWs, both as research and communication tools, and in the true sense of
human-centered computational engineering.
The central idea here is that immersive VR and VWs are potentially transformative
technologies on par with the Web itself, which can and should be used for serious
purposes, including science and scholarship; they are not just a form of games. By
conveying this idea to professional scientists and scholars, and by leading by exam-
ple, we hope to engage a much broader segment of the academic community in utiliz-
ing, and developing further these technologies.
This evolutionary process may have an impact well beyond the academia, as these
technologies blend with the cyber-world of the Web, and change the ways we interact
with each other and with the informational content of the next generation Web. While
at a minimum we expect to develop a set of “best practices” for the use of VR and
VWs technologies in science and scholarship, it is also possible that practical and
commercial applications may result or may be inspired by this work. If indeed im-
mersive VR becomes a major new component of the modern society, as a platform for
commerce, entertainment, etc., the potential impact may be very significant.
In our work, we are assisted by a large number of volunteers, including scientists,
technologists, and educators, most of them professional members of MICA. Some of
them are actively engaged in the VWs development activities under the auspices of
various governmental agencies, e.g., NASA. We have also established a strong net-
work of international partnerships, including colleagues and institutions in the Nether-
lands, Italy, Japan, China, and Canada (a list which is bound to grow). We are also
establishing collaborative partnerships with several groups in the IT industry, most
notably Microsoft Research, and IBM, and we expect that this set of collaborations
will also grow in time. This broad spectrum of professionally engaged parties show-
cases the growing interest in the area of scientific and scholarly uses of VWs, and
their further developments for such purposes.
Acknowledgments. The work of MICA has been supported in part by the U.S. Na-
tional Science Foundation grants AST-0407448 and HCC-0917817, and by the Ajax
Foundation. We also acknowledge numerous volunteers who have contributed their
time and talents to this organization, especially S. McPhee, S. Smith, K. Prowl, C.
Woodland, D. Enfield, S. Cianciulli, T. McConaghy, W. Scotti, J. Ames, and C.
White, among many others. We also thank the conference organizers for their interest
and support. SGD also acknowledges the creative atmosphere of the Aspen Center
for Physics, where this paper was completed.
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Characterizing Mobility and Contact Networks
in Virtual Worlds
Felipe Machado, Matheus Santos, Virgı́lio Almeida, and Dorgival Guedes
Department of Computer Science

Federal University of Minas Gerais
Belo Horizonte, MG, Brasil
{felipemm,matheus,virgilio,dorgival}@dcc.ufmg.br
Abstract. Virtual worlds have recently gained wide recognition as an

important field of study in Computer Science. In this work we present
an analysis of the mobility and interactions among characters in World
of Warcraft (WoW) and Second Life based on the contact opportunities
extracted from actual user data in each of those domains. We analyze
character contacts in terms of their spatial and temporal characteristics,
as well as the social network derived from such contacts. Our results
show that the contacts observed may be more influenced by the nature
of the interactions and goals of the users in each situation than by the in-
trinsic structure of such worlds. In particular, observations from a city in
WoW are closer to those of Second Life than to other areas in WoW itself.
Keywords: Multi-player On-line Games, Virtual Worlds, social net-

works, complex networks, characterization.
1 Introduction
Virtual worlds are an important emerging form of social media that have recently
caught the attention of the research community for their growth, their potential
of applications and the new challenges they pose [1,2]. According to the com-
panies responsible for those worlds, as of December 2008, World of Warcraft
(WoW) is being played by more than 11.5 million subscribers worldwide and
Second Life total residents are more than 16.5 million. Other data suggests that
there are more than 16 million players of massively multi-player on-line games
(MMOGs), where players control one or more characters in virtual worlds. Not
only that, but users spend a significant amount of time on-line: in Q3/2008,
residents spent 102.8 million hours in Second Life. Each virtual world fosters the
creation of an active market both inside them and in other sites in the Internet,
moving billions of dollars in the entertainment industry [3].
The environments provided by such virtual worlds are usually complex, pro-
viding a variety of opportunities for players to interact, fight and develop their
characters. The virtual worlds are often divided in zones that may represent con-
tinents, islands, cities and buildings, where characters must move. Players may
be forced to cooperate with others in order to achieve certain goals, and have to

Characterizing Mobility and Contact Networks in Virtual Worlds 45
fight elements of other groups according to the rules of each environment. Even
Second Life can be analysed in such a manner, although in that world there
are no explicit competitive situations other than those arising in usual social
interactions.
All the possibilities offered by those environments create a highly complex
virtual reality where a variety of characters seek different goals. Although some
aspects of the virtual worlds may be quite detached from reality (like the multi-
tude of different forms of intelligent life and the presence of magic forces), other
aspects can be quite similar to the real world. After all, characters are controlled
by real people, and interactions are often based on rules also existing outside
the virtual environments. Information extracted from such virtual worlds may
be directly useful to understand the way users behave in them, but can also be
applied to other problems. For example, information about user mobility may
be used in studies of how viruses spread among people, how information dis-
seminates through their contacts, or how malware may spread among wireless
devices carried by them [4].
Our goal in this work is to provide a first analysis of those worlds in terms of
the way players move through the game and how they interact. That is achieved
through a spatio-temporal analysis of mobility patterns in both worlds. From
those patterns, we derive the social networks based on the users’ contact pat-
terns and study them considering the similarities and differences of the two en-
vironments. While in Second Life interactions are mostly cooperative, in WoW
they also have a competitive nature, leading to mixed behaviors. That difference
is visible in some of the results. As previously mentioned, the information we
provide here can be useful for those interested in the development and analysis
of virtual worlds, as well as an input for experiments that depend on movement
and contact data for real people, such as in epidemiological studies or research
on mobile networks, for example.
In the Sections that follow, we start by discussing related work in Section 2.
Section 3 provide a general description of the virtual worlds considered, while
Section 4 discusses our approach to monitoring them and deriving the metrics
we used. The subsequent Sections that follow present the results of our analysis
in terms of mobility patterns and contact social networks. Finally, Section 7
provides some conclusions and discusses future work.
2 Related Work
Virtual worlds have recently become the focus of researchers looking for data that
could be used to model real world mobility patterns. The Second Life virtual
environment has been monitored to collect information about avatar movements
to mirror movement in enclosed spaces [5]. Metrics used included time to first
contact, contact time, inter-contact time, and covered distance, among others.
They also analyzed the users’ contact network using complex networks metrics
such as node degree, network diameter and clustering coefficients. We use similar
metrics in this work.
46 F. Machado et al.
Characterization of on-line games has been an interest for some time now,
but a lot of effort has been focused on studying the network traffic produced
by them, not in understanding the mechanics of their virtual worlds [6,7,8]. In
relation to the particular worlds considered in this study, there has been previous
work characterizing Second Life and World of Warcraft from the point of view
of the users, by collecting traffic in the client applications [9,10], but again with
little insight into the virtual worlds themselves. With that in mind, this work
is, to the best of our knowledge, the first one to consider two different virtual
worlds with different interaction patterns and objectives. It is also the first one
to consider the behavior of avatars in World of Warcraft from a social network
perspective derived from their contacts.
3 Virtual Worlds: Background

Both environments considered can be seen as examples of massive multi-player
on-line games (MMOGs) based on the Role-Playing Game model (RPG). In such
games, players perform their roles through their characters in the game, which
interact based on behavioral rules defined by the game environment. For the
sake of completeness, this Section provides a brief description of both worlds.
3.1 Second Life

In Second Life, each user controls a virtual character (avatar) that can own
objects, real estate, stores, etc. Usually there is no concept of game levels, since
the game is entirely focused on social interactions. Hierarchies and class divisions
are left for the players. Basically, an avatar sets itself apart from others based
on its looks and its possessions.
Differently from a traditional RPG, there are no clearly stated goals to Second
Life, no missions or tasks defined by the game for the users to complete. The idea
is just to allow users to interact socially, talking, performing collective activities,
or trading, for example. Users can create virtual groups, which are just used to
bring together users with common interests, like the appreciation for a certain
location, the desire to meet other people or just as a means to make it simpler
to keep contact over time. Avatars can become friends with others, leading to
an underlying social network, although the environment does not offer tools to
build such networks explicitly.
The game territory is quite large, being composed by different continents and
many islands. All of it is divided in smaller regions called lands, usually in the
form of 256 meter-sided squares. Each land has a defined maximum occupancy
and is kept associated with a specific server in order to make load distribution
simpler. Management of user actions are therefore distributed among the servers.
3.2 World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft (WoW) adheres strongly to the concept of RPG. It takes
place in a virtual world divided in large continents, each one with its special
characteristics and sub-divisions. In the game, each user can have multiple char-
acters, but can control only one at a time. The goal of the game is, just like
in most RPGs, to evolve the characters based on a hierarchy defined by the
game and to defeat the enemy, which can be another player or a programmed
entity running on the game servers. For that end there are different resources
and possibilities, like items that characters can obtain during the game, their
professions and special abilities they can develop. To help characters in their
quests and facilitate interaction and trade among users, various cities exist in
the territories offering supplies, shelter and training for characters.
In WoW, each character belongs to one faction, race and class. They must
belong to one of the two existing enemy factions, the Horde and the Alliance,
bound to fight each other. For that reason, a meeting of characters of different
factions cannot be collaborative, but instead must be surrounded by a clear form
of dispute. Cities can belong to one of the factions or declare themselves neutral
grounds, the only place where members of different factions can meet without
open confrontation. The auction houses in such cities can mediate trade between
the factions.
Continents are divided in zones with different shapes larger but similar to
Second Life’s lands in the way they restrict movements between them to a few
points of transit. In that way, each zone can be controlled independently of
the others. Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are the older continents in the
game, while Outlands is a newer continent added during an expansion named the
Burning Crusade. There is also the concept of instances, regions of the map that
are duplicated to restrict the occupancy to certain groups each time. If various
groups go to a certain region to complete a mission, game servers instantiate one
copy of that region for each group, in case the goal is to allow each group to work
on the mission without affecting the others’ progress. That leads, in practice, to
areas with externally controlled populations.
4 Methodology
In order to understand the behavior of characters in WoW and Second Life, we
collected data from WoW at different levels, so we could analyse behavior in
terms of the large continents, controlled regions (instances) and a city, which
we expected to be a region with characteristics closer to those of an island in
Second Life.
Table 1 shows some general information about the data collected for each
of the virtual regions we considered. The headers used for each of the first
five columns refer to elements from WoW: main continents (Eastern Kingdoms,
Kalimdor, and Outlands), an instance of a region (Instance 18 ), and a city
(Stormwind ). The last column refers to Second Life. Rows show, for the du-
ration of the logs, the total number of distinct characters seen in each region,
the average and maximum number of concurrent users actually on-line, and the
average session length in hours. The two worlds considered differ significantly
in their operations, what led to the use of different data harvesting techniques.
The details of each process are discussed next.
Table 1. General information about the collected data
WoW S.L.
E. K. Kal. Inst18 Outl. SW.
Characters 1276 1039 750 611 511 511
Avg. concurrent users 109 105 88 56 109 31
Max. concurrent users 340 299 225 123 340 49
Avg. session length (h) 1.4 1.6 1.6 1.4 1.2 0.05
To collect data from Second Life we implemented a client for the game using
the libsecondlife library1 . This automated client connects to the server as a
player, interacting with the world following a pattern defined by the programmer.
For this work, the client moved in large circles around the center or the territory,
since it was found that a moving avatar draws less attention.
Once the resulting avatar reaches one of the lands it begins receiving information
about the general conditions of the land and all other characters in that region
(their IDs, their position relative to the land and whether they are online or offline.
The client stores that information once every five seconds in a record containing
the number of online users in that land at the time, followed by a list with character
ID and position for each avatar. The logs used in this work were selected to hold
a continuous 24 hour period. The region used was the Dance Island2 , a popular
location in Second Life which contains a dance floor and a bar, among other things.
Besides the official World of Warcraft (WoW) game servers, there are currently
other versions of those servers, developed through reverse engineering, maintained
by users around the globe. For this work we used a message log obtained from one
of those user-maintained servers for version 3.5 of the game. The log was created by
instrumenting the private Mangos server to log every network message received or
sent by it over a 24 hour period. That resulted in a 33 GB data log with more than
one hundred million messages, being 15 million sent from clients to the server, and
approximately 96 million sent by the server. If the server showed any interruption
in its execution the period of the fault was removed from the logs and users re-
turned to their activities where they had left them at the moment of the problem,
avoiding any impact to the players movements.
Coordinates in the WoW messages are relative to the main continents and
instances the characters are in, so there is no global coordinate system that can
be equally applied to all characters. To take that into account, all the follow-
ing analysis considered each continent separately. As previously mentioned, we
considered the continents Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, and Outland. We also
analysed separately one of the major cities in the game, Stormwind, to compare
with the results from Second Life, since a city in WoW offered an area more
similar to a land than a complete continent. Finally, we also added an instance
of a replicated region of the game, identified as Instance 18, where the number
of players was controlled by the game server.
1
http://www.libsecondlife.org/
2
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dance%20Island/
An anomaly identified in the game, when compared to the real world, was
the presence of different forms of teletransportation 3 . In some of the analysis, we
experimented with removing that functionality from character behavior to try to
get patterns closer to the real world, since teletransportation would allow them
to travel unlimited distances in practically no time, something clearly impossible
in the real world. To achieve that, each time a character used teletransportation,
disappearing from one location and materializing at another one, we considered
that the first character left the game at the earlier position and a new one entered
the game at the materialization spot. We also analyzed the movements as they
happened originally, with teletransportation.
Once data was collected from WoW, we extracted from the log all messages
carrying character positions with the ID of the character, its position and the
message timestamp. That information was then processed to create a final log
with the same format of that created for Second Life, with all active characters’
positions recorded every five seconds. After a single record format was avail-
able for both worlds they were processed using the same algorithms to derive
information such as covered distances, demographic density and contact events.
Contacts were considered to occur whenever two characters were closer than a
certain distance r, considered 10 meters in this case. That definition allows us to
consider not only direct character interaction but also close encounters, which
have been identified in the literature as relevant for multiple purposes, such as
epidemiological studies and wireless network interactions [11]. From the contact
information we built the network of contacts, one of the main focus of this paper,
and derived also a temporal analysis of contacts. For the temporal analysis, we
computed time to first contact, the time it took characters to establish their first
contact in the environment, contact time, the times characters spent in contact
with others, and inter-contact time, the times between two successive contacts
by each pair of characters. The results of the analysis of the metrics derived are
discussed in the following Sections.
5 Spatio-temporal Analysis
5.1 Spatial Analysis
In this section we analyze and compare character movements in the two worlds,
both in terms of distances traveled and demographic densities.
Distances traveled. Figure 1 shows distances traveled (both as a probability

density function, PDF, and a cumulative probability density function, CDF)
for both worlds in log scale, with and without teletransportation in WoW. As
expected, based on the dimensions of each area, probability of short travels is
higher in Second Life, while distances in WoW with teletransportation may be
significantly larger.
3
In Second Life avatars can also use teletransportation, but only between lands. Since
we consider only one land, such events were seen as a user leaving the region.
1 1
0.1
P[X <= x] (CDF)

P[X = x] (PDF)
0.01 0.1
SL
WoW (no Tel.)
WoW
0.001 SL
WoW (no Tel.)
WoW
0.0001 0.01
1 10 100 1000 10000 100000 1e+06 10 100 1000 10000 100000
Travel Length Distance traversed
Fig. 1. Probability distributions (simple and cumulative) for distances traveled by

characters in each region
The reason for shorter distances in Second Life is due not only to the fact that
the area is smaller, but also to the fact that the interest of characters is focused
in meeting other characters. There are no goals that may send a character to a
remote point, which would lead to long distances. Their intention is to socialize
with the other characters there, which are often at a short distance from each
other. Once conversation begins, people tend to move less.
On the other hand, in WoW objectives are set in different points of the world,
often apart from each other, like creatures to be challenged, caves to be explored
and other places of interest, which almost often are located away from the cities.
Thus, characters must travel long distances to reach those points of interest and
also to return to the cities or their points of origin.
The CDFs of traveled distances show that more clearly, with a concentration
of shorter distances for Second Life, with just about 10% of travels longer than
1000 meters. Considering the region is a square with sides 256 meters long, such
traveled distances seem excessive in such limited space. We suspect most (or all)
of those to be automated avatars (bots), which are somewhat common in Second
Life — our crawler included. Next, if we consider WoW without teletransporta-
tion, about 50% of the characters traveled more than 1000 meters, and about 10%
covered more than 20 kilometers. Finally, as should be expected, considering tele-
transportation increases distances significantly: more than 50% of the characters
cover more than 10 kilometers in this case. That means that in this case the ma-
jority of the characters cover distances similar to or larger than those in the case
without that capability, and less then 20% of the characters cover distances compa-
rable to those found in Second Life. If we compare Second Life and WoW without
teletransportation, approximately 50% of the characters in WoW still cover dis-
tances longer than all found in Second Life, largely due to the existence of mounts
and other features in WoW that increase a characters mobility.
Demographic Density. To evaluate the occupation of the land in each world,

we divided each region in squares with 20 meters on each side, and counted the
total number of characters seen on each square during the 24 hours of our logs.
1
1 SL - Dance
Stormwind
instance 18 0.1
0.1
E Kingdoms
Kalimdor 0.01
P[X > x] (CCDF)

0.01
P[X = x] (PDF)
Outland
0.001 0.001
0.0001 0.0001
SL - Dance
Stormwind
1e-05 1e-05 instance 18
Kalimdor
1e-06 1e-06 E Kingdoms
Outland
1e-07 1e-07
1 10 100 1000 10000 100000 1 10 100 1000 10000 100000
Density Aggregate density
Fig. 2. Probability distribution, and complementary cumulative distribution of the

aggregate demographic density
Figure 2 shows PDF and CCDF (complementary cumulative probability den-

sity function) of the aggregate density computed as the number of characters
seen at each square. We can see that the PDF for Second Life stays constant for
most of the densities, with some oscillation for lower concentrations. WoW, on
the other hand, has a much more skewed distribution for all large areas, with a
behavior close to a power law for most of the range considered. Stormwind, the
city in Wow, being a restricted area, has a behavior closer to that of the Second
Life land, although still closer to the general WoW pattern.
From the CCDF, we can see that the three continents and the instance in
WoW, being larger areas, spent most of the day with no visitors (about 1% of
the area had at least one visitor during the period, except for Outland, in which
case less than 0.5% of the area was visited. Even in Second Life, more than 50%
of the area was not visited according to the log. Again, the curve for the city,
Stormwind, is closer to that of Second Life. It might be the case that they would
be even closer if their areas were more close to each other.
5.2 Temporal Analysis
To better understand the nature of the interactions in each world, we considered

the temporal dynamic of the contacts. The metrics used, time to first contact,
contact time and inter-contact time, were discussed in Section 4.
Considering the strictly social nature of Second Live, time to first contact and
inter-contact times should be shorter and contact time should be longer than for
WoW. Second Life users enter the world mostly to socialize, so they seek other
people as soon as they get on-line, reducing time to first contact. For the same
reason, after they meet a character or a group, they tend to start a conversation
in stead of just pass by and go somewhere else. That should be particularly true
for Dance Island. As Table 2 and Figure 3 show, that is exactly the case, except
in a few cases.
Stormwind, being a city, again shares some of the characteristics of Second
Life. Cities serve as temporary bases and support facilities, so people tend to
Table 2. Contacts temporal metrics (averages in seconds)
WoW S.L.
E. K. Kal. Inst. 18 Outland S.W.
First contact 2170 1943 2695 520 195 163
Avg
Contact time 89 170 316 128 474 284

Inter-contact time 384 405 435 112 1222 387
seek populated places, like markets, banks and training sites once they reach
them, leading to early contacts, so they have similar times to first contact. In
the city, however, long sessions where players seek to improve their user ex-
perience (trading, grouping, training skills, seeking quests, chatting) seems to
dominate contact times, making them even longer than for Second Life. Also,
after characters part in Stormwind, they take much longer to meet again (if they
ever do), as the average inter-contact time indicates. That was mostly due to the
nature of the game: once characters part after training or conducting business
they tend to leave the city for new quests, returning much later. Both features
are also visible in Fig. 3, where we can see that approximately 50% of the inter-
contact times in Stormwind are longer than 100 seconds, against only 30% in
Second Life, and also the longer contact times for Stormwind (roughly 5% are
longer than 2.5 hours).
Other elements of interest in Table 2 are the lower inter-contact time for Out-
land and high first-contact times and longer contact times in the Instance18.
Those are also explained by the nature of the game. Outland is a continent
visited by advanced characters in their quest to improve their rankings even
further. In that condition, collaboration with other characters is important and
they tend to meet often to exchange information, if for nothing else. That re-
duces inter-contact time. Instances are mostly places were collaborative game
play is essential. Characters usually join outside an instance and enter them
together. Once inside, they proceed together (getting closer or farther apart as
the situation requires) but with no contacts with characters other than those
in their group. We only registered the (eventual) moments when characters get
more separated and then get closer again. On the other hand, contact times and
inter-contact times capture the together-again-apart-again nature of the action.
From Fig. 3 we see that Second Life has fewer short-lived contacts: characters
tend to at least try to start a conversation each time they meet, so contacts tend
to last at least a little longer (only 20% last less then 30 seconds). On the other
hand, in WoW is more common for characters to just pass by others while en
route to a farther destination, without ever stopping — although that is, again,
a little less common for Outland and Stormwind, for the reasons discussed. In
both, there are some short-lived contacts but also some long-lived ones.
We can see basically five categories in terms of time to first contact in Fig. 3.
Clearly Second Life is the one with lower values (almost 80% of the first contacts
happen in less than 8 seconds, while the opposite is true for instance 18 (50%
take longer than 4 minutes). Outland and Stormwind, since they have conditions
1 1
E Kingdoms
P[X <= x] (CDF)
P[X <= x] (CDF)

Kalimdor
instance 18
Outland
Stormwind
SL - Dance SL - Dance
Outland
Stormwind
Kalimdor
E Kingdoms
instance 18
10 100 1000 10000 100000 10 100 1000

Time to first contact (sec) Contact time (sec)
1
P[X <= x] (CDF)
Kalimdor
instance 18
E Kingdoms
Outland
SL - Dance
Stormwind
10 100 1000 10000

Intercontact time (sec)
Fig. 3. Aggregate probability distributions for times to first contact, contact time and
inter-contact time, respectively
that foster exchanges, have the lowest times to first contact in WoW (at least
50% are lower than 10 seconds in both cases), and finally Easter Kingdoms and
Kalimdor, being continents with less advanced players, who tend to stay alone
for longer periods, have higher times to first contact (approximately 50% are
above 2 minutes).
6 Network Structures
Our goal in this Section is to understand the contact network formed by char-
acters in the two worlds, based on the definition of contact as a function of
physical proximity in the virtual world. This information is important to under-
stand the opportunities for interaction in the virtual world, but also as a basis
for the analysis of other events in the real world, like in the study of epidemics,
or forwarding of messages in a mobile environment, for example.
Based on the logged information about character position in WoW and Second
Life, we built a non-directional contact network, connecting characters who were
closer than 10 meters from each other. For the degree analysis, only that, we
considered the case where edges were all equal (there was any contact) and the
case where they were weighted by the number of encounters observed between
the two vertices they connect. That way, node degrees computed without weights
give us the number of other characters each character was ever in contact, and
weighted degrees give us the total number of contacts each character had. For
the graph without weights, we computed clustering coefficients, degrees, and
betweeness for the vertices, as well as all pairs shortest paths.
The degree of each vertex shows the number of other characters a given char-
acter contacted during the duration of the logs. The weighted degree (sum of the
values of a node’s edges) tell us how many times that character had contacts. The
clustering coefficient describes the probability of characters B and C meeting each
other, given that another character A had contacts with each of them. The shortest
path indicates the minimum number of characters that would have to be contacted
to relay an information from A to B, and the betweeness represents the probability
of a certain character being in the shortest path between any pair of vertices. These
metrics help us understand how contacts (and possible interactions) happen be-
tween characters in a given virtual world, and allow us to estimate how closely nit
are groups, how separate can communities be, and whether some characters may
play a major role in the exchange of information and goods between the population
of the virtual worlds. Average values for those metrics are shown in Table 3.
Clearly, Second Life and the Stormwind city have the highest degrees among
the regions considered, although Stormwind’s are noticeably higher, what may
be explained by the larger number of characters which visited the city when
compared to the number of visitors to the Second Life island during the time of
the measurements. The average number of contacts in instance 18 is lower due
to the nature of the game, since groups enter the area and stay close for the
time it take them to complete the task they are there to complete. In Kalimdor
and Eastern Kingdoms, although the average number of characters contacted
is lower, contacts tend to repeat more often (averaging three contacts per pair,
against two in other realms).
For a more detailed analysis, Figure 4 shows the probability distributions for
node degrees and weighed degrees, while Figure 5 show the cumulative proba-
bility distributions for the same values for each contact network. It is noticeable
that vertex degrees in both WoW and Second Life match power laws. That
means most of the vertices have low degrees, but a small fraction of them have
very high degrees. Characters in both Second Life and Stormwind have lower
probability of having smaller degrees and higher probabilities of having higher
degrees than the others. The results for weighted degree are similar and curves
follow similar patterns.
Table 3. Average values for the contact network metrics
WoW S.L.
E. K. Kal. Inst. 18 Outland S.W.
Degree 13 12 6 14 37 16
Averages
Weighted Degree 36 35 12 22 69 24
CC 0.31 0.32 0.35 0.55 0.50 0.50
Betweenness 0.0038 0.0041 0.0059 0.0031 0.0035 0.0061
Shortest Path 4.5 4.0 5.4 5.6 2.3 3.6
1 1
instance 18 instance 18
E Kingdoms Kalimdor
Kalimdor E Kingdoms
Outland Outland
0.1 SL 0.1 Stormwind
P[X = x] (PDF)
P[X = x] (PDF)
Stormwind SL
0.01 0.01
0.001 0.001
10 100 10 100
Degree Weighted degree
Fig. 4. Degrees and weighted degrees for the contact networks (PDF)
1 1
P[X <= x] (CDF)
P[X <= x] (CDF)
instance 18 instance 18
Kalimdor
E Kingdoms E Kingdoms
Outland
Outland Kalimdor
0.1 SL
Stormwind SL
Stormwind
1 10 100 1 10 100
Degree Weighted degree
Fig. 5. Degrees and weighted degrees for the contact networks (CDF)
The cumulative distribution of degrees and weighted degrees (Figure 5) con-

firm the tendency of the collaborative areas (Second Life island and Stormwind
city) to foster more character contacts. The probability of characters with few
contacts are much lower in those areas (less than 8% of the characters have
no contacts while in there, against at least 15% for the others). However, Sec-
ond Life has fewer nodes with a very high number of contacts (only 10% have
contacts with more than 30 characters, against more than 40% in Stormwind).
Results are similar for weighted degrees.
As seen in Figure 6, clustering coefficients (CC) are more highly concentrated
in Second Life and Stormwind. Only 20% of the nodes have CC lower than 0.2
and 0.3, respectively, and the curves get more similar for larger values. On the
other hand, approximately 20% of the nodes have CC higher than 0.6. The two
continents other than Outland and the instance have lower CC values overall.
Outland, the continent for more advanced characters, although showing a higher
probability of low CCs than Second Life and Stormwind (40% of the nodes have
CC smaller then 0.3), it has a higher concentration of larger values than those
realms (20% have CC larger than 0.8). That may have a relation to the fact that
interaction is more important in higher levels of the game and some characters
get a lot of clustering.
P[X <= x] (CDF)

instance 18
Kalimdor
E Kingdoms
Outland
SL
Stormwind
0.1 1
Clustering coefficient
Fig. 6. Clustering coefficients for the contact networks (CDF)
1
E Kingdoms
0.1 Kalimdor
instance 18
Outland
P[X <= x] (CDF)
Stormwind
P[X = x] (PDF)
SL
0.01
Outland
instance 18
Kalimdor
E Kingdoms
SL
0.001 Stormwind
0.0001 0.001 0.01 0.1 1 1e-06 1e-05 0.0001 0.001 0.01 0.1 1
Betweeness Betweeness
Fig. 7. Betweeness: probability distribution and its cumulative distribution
The probability distribution for betweeness is shown in Figure 7. Based on

that value we can evaluate the structure of the underlying graphs. Graphs with
strong hierarchical structures, or with clusters connected by one or a few links,
named bridges, tend to show a highly uneven distribution of betweeness. That is
the case because most of the paths go through those central links, while on a less
hierarchical graph, or one with fewer bridges, paths will go through more nodes,
leading to less uneven distribution. Apparently, for the contact networks of the
virtual worlds considered, although there are a few characters that contacted
a large number of others, in general the networks have low betweeness. For
example, for Easter Kingdoms, 99.5% of the characters have betweeness under
0.07. However, three characters have a much higher value, around 0.16, meaning
that 16% of the shortest paths go through them. That suggests the existence of
bridges or similar structures in those contact networks.
On the other hand, for Second Life and Stormwind there are fewer very low
values, so the distribution of paths is less skewed, suggesting a less hierarchical
structure. On the other extreme, Outland, the realm of more advanced players,
has mostly low values for that metric (more than 70% of the nodes are in at
most 0.1% of the paths, and only 10% of the nodes are in at least 1% of the
paths. It may be the case that when all characters are at a higher level and all
1e+06
E Kingdoms
Kalimdor
100000 instance 18
Number of occurrences
Outland
Stormwind
10000 SL
1000
100
10
1
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
Shortest path
Fig. 8. Histogram of shortest paths values observed for each region
seeking the same goal they tend to avoid situations where many of them may
depend on a few others.
The distribution of shortest path distances is an interesting metric for the
characterization of complex networks, since it reveals the network diameter. It
shows the intensity of the interactions on the network and suggest how fast
information (or resources) can travel from one point of the network to another
one. Observing Figure 8, the histogram of the shortest path distances found
for each realm, we can see that both Second Life and Stormwind follow similar
patterns with lower maximum distances. That is expected, for environments
where the interaction is the major goal of its occupants. On the other hand,
advanced players tend to build networks with larger diameters, as seen in the
case of Outland and even the other WoW realms. That may be an indication of
the impact of competition, which is always a factor in those areas.
7 Conclusions
We have observed World of Warcraft and Second Life, characterizing them in
terms of the spatial and temporal nature of the contacts between user-controlled
characters and of the network built from contact events. The two worlds showed
significant differences in terms of the distances traversed by characters, but more
similar patterns in terms of density of occupation of the areas.
In terms of distances traveled, we concluded that differences are mostly due
to the fact that regions in WoW are usually larger, and also to the fact that the
nature of the game leads characters to seek their goals in remote locations of
the territories. In Second Life and the WoW city considered, characters tend to
stay in areas which are smaller and more highly populated, traveling less. In all
cases, most of the area is empty most of the time, while some regions attract
more attention from players.
In the temporal analysis of contacts we have observed the influence of the
nature of the game: time to first contact is shorter in Second Life, a purely
social game, than in WoW, where players have various goals, many of them
not requiring contact with others. Also in this case, Second Life is closer to
Stormwind city, although with still shorter times. Contact times are longer in
Second Life on average, since in search for socialization people tend to spend
time together, although some times were longer in Stormwind due to the nature
of some contacts there. Inter-contact times in Second Life were shorter, since
socialization again draw characters together more often.
In the study of the network of contacts, differences were more noticeable be-
tween realms associated with different objectives than between the two virtual
worlds as a whole. The differences in clustering coefficient are explained by the
fact that people tend to interact more as groups in Second Life, but also in
Stormwind, to some extent. On the other hand, when cooperation was more
necessary in the area for advanced players in WoW, we also found higher clus-
tering coefficients. However, while the betweeness in openly competitive areas
showed the formation of some structure, that was less noticeable in the social
areas (although still present) and even less so in the highly competitive realm
of advanced players where they tended not to rely on other characters as much,
although interactions were common.
In conclusion, we have observed that the similarities and differences in the
way characters get in contact with each other in the virtual worlds of Second
Life and World of Warcraft, for the cases considered here, are more dependent
on the nature of the interaction expected in each area than on the particular
virtual world they take place. In that aspect, the Second Life Island and the
WoW city, where cooperation between characters was the major objective, were
often more similar to each other than the city to the rest of the WoW world,
where competition played a major part. Not only that, but the nature of the
goals of characters in each area also set them apart. The continents open to all
players were clearly similar to each other, while the continent restricted to more
advanced players and the instance dedicated to special group play had particular
elements explained by their nature.
We intend to further our analysis of these findings in our future work, using
more detailed information from the WoW logs to better qualify each interaction
between characters, so we can more clearly identify the effects of cooperation,
competition between members of a same group with conflicting goals and open
competition, forced by the nature of the game, between rival factions. We also
intend to apply the information about mobility patterns and contacts to the
study of epidemics, both in the case of biological threads (diseases) and computer
related (malware dissemination in wireless networks).
Acknowledgments. This research was partially sponsored by FAPEMIG,

FINEP, CAPES, CNPq and the Brazilian National Institute of Science and Tech-
nology for the Web (grant no. 573871/2008-6).
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Landmarks and Time-Pressure in Virtual Navigation:
Towards Designing Gender-Neutral Virtual
Environments
Elena Gavrielidou and Maarten H. Lamers
Media Technology M.Sc. program

Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS)
Leiden University, The Netherlands
elegav@gmail.com,lamers@liacs.nl
Abstract. Male superiority in the field of spatial navigation has been reported
upon, numerous times. Although there have been indications that men and
women handle environmental navigation in different ways, with men preferring
Euclidian navigation and women using mostly topographic techniques, we have
found no reported links between those differences and the shortcomings of
women on ground of ineffective environment design.
We propose the enhancement of virtual environments with landmarks – a
technique we hypothesize could aid the performance of women without impair-
ing that of men. In addition we touch upon a novel side of spatial navigation,
with the introduction of time-pressure in the virtual environment.
Our experimental results show that women benefit tremendously from land-
marks in un-stressed situations, while men only utilize them successfully when
they are under time-pressure. Furthermore we report on the beneficial impact
that time-pressure has on men in terms of performance while navigating in a
virtual environment.
Keywords: virtual environments, navigation, gender, landmarks, time-pressure.
1 Introduction
There exists a recurring argument of male superiority [1], portrayed as the prominent
finding in the field of spatial cognition in virtual environments. Nevertheless, research
also shows an innate difference in the ways that men and women understand and
navigate through their environment. While men utilize mostly Euclidean navigation
strategies [2] women show an inherent preference towards the use of landmarks [3].
Although a difference in navigation strategies between the sexes has been reported,
we wonder why this reported inability of women to navigate, is not (partially) linked
to the shortcomings of these experiments’ [1,2,4,5,6,7] respective virtual environment
designs. We share the opinion of Caplan and Caplan [8] that, when gender differences
in spatial cognition exist, this is not due to biological inferiority [3,5] of one gender,
but rather, we suggest that to some extent this is the result of men and women having
different skills, suitable to handling different aspects of the environment most impor-
tant to their own sex.
Landmarks and Time-Pressure in Virtual Navigation 61
This becomes especially important when designing virtual environments. Even

subtle differences between the sexes’ navigation techniques have the potential to be
magnified in a virtual environment that does not take their respective needs into con-
sideration [7].
Virtual environments should take into account this difference in spatial perception
between the sexes. This study could act as the foundation for designing practical ap-
plications that compensate for the inadequacy of previous virtual environments to
facilitate a balance in the performance of both sexes. Such a balanced navigation
design framework would allow women to perform to standards equal to those of men,
and weaken the argument of male spatial cognition superiority in virtual environ-
ments, on grounds of ineffective environment design.
The experiments we present study two different approaches in the alteration of the
virtual environment. The first is the introduction of landmarks in the unfamiliar vir-
tual environment as a way to directly manipulate the local perception of the partici-
pants. The second is the application of a timed deadline to the virtual way-finding
task, which, to the best of our knowledge is a novel introduction in the field of human
spatial cognition.
We hope to discover which virtual environment design aids the performance of
both the sexes, thus establishing a framework for designing virtual training environ-
ments (and possibly GPS-based navigation systems) that successfully comply with the
both sexes, without impairing the performance of either one.
2 Related Work
2.1 Landmarks as a Navigational Aid
Even though great emphasis has been put on the usefulness of landmarks in naviga-
tion of real environments [9,10], and while evidence suggests that navigation through
virtual environments is problematic and often unsuccessful in the cases where sup-
plementary information such as landmarks are not provided [11,12], a connection has
not yet been made between the preference of women to landmarks in navigation [3]
and the previously reported superiority of men in spatial cognition. Nor has there been
evidence specifically targeting the performance of women in virtual environments
where landmarks are present. Furthermore, Ruddle et al [10] proposed that concrete
and recognizable landmarks could enhance the performance of participants in relation
to abstract landmarks, but no significant improvement has been reported in the per-
formance of the subjects, whether with, or without landmarks. We suggest that per-
haps making distinction in the performance of men and women could indicate
whether improvement of performance is significant in one of both genders.
2.2 Time-Pressure and Spatial Cognition
The second parameter we address is that of a timed deadline. In its more general ap-
plications this is a much-debated issue, and opinions vary on the impact it has on a
presupposed task. Research shows that in general, when time-pressured, people be-
come more anxious and energetic and adopt a number of different strategies to cope
62 E. Gavrielidou and M.H. Lamers
with a deadline. Processes underlying judgment and decision-making undergo change

when the time available is limited [13,14].
Svenson and Benson [15] suggested an increase in the quality of decision-making
in stressful situations created by deadlines. Others, however, showed that time-pressure
reduced the quality of decision-making [16] and the inclination to take risks [14].
Within these opposing views, we have not come across any evidence to show ei-
ther a positive or a negative effect of time-pressure on human spatial cognition, or
specifically on the spatial cognition of either males or females. Hence we propose to
study the impact of a time-limit on subjects in a virtual environment navigation task,
both with and without landmarks, and for men and women.
3 Methodology
3.1 Virtual Environment, Task and Subjects
A ‘DOOM-like’ maze (as used in [17]) of 8 rooms was created with Blender3D author-
ing software [18]. Subjects were required to navigate through it in a task design similar
to that of Cutmore et al [19]. To collect a golden ring, subjects had to find a route from
the first to the last room of the maze through a predefined route and then return to the
initial room along precisely the same route. Only doors that lay on the correct route
were unlocked, all other doors were locked, effectively creating a single possible route
through the maze. The correct route through the maze was shown before three subse-
quent tries by each subject. An example route through the maze is illustrated in Fig. 1.
For automated time recording the task was completed when the subject walked into the
red door at the initial position, as instructed by the researchers.
Subjects were aged 15-50 and selected to have no more than 3 hours per week of
experience on 3D video games. Performance of 10 males and 10 females was meas-
ured on two parameters: the participants’ way-finding skill, namely the number of
errors (attempts to open a locked door) while navigating through the maze, and the
time taken to reproduce the route.
3.2 Introducing Landmarks and Time-Pressure
There were four different states of the experimental virtual environment. Every sub-
ject performed the described task in each of these states. Different maze layouts were
randomized over the different states to ensure equal distribution of states over maze
layouts. The four states were:
In the Neutral Environment (E1) there was no time limitation to the task and the
rooms had no identifiable characteristics.
The Landmark Environment (E2): An environment and task similar to E1 with the
addition of specific identifiable real-life landmarks situated inside the rooms (plant,
lamp, kettle, and various other objects).
The Countdown Environment (E3): An environment and task similar to E1 with
the addition of a 60 seconds time constraint (slightly under the average time of com-
pletion for the task, as found in the building/testing phase of the mazes). A countdown
timer was visible on-screen.
Fig. 1. Bird’s eye view of an example route through 8 rooms within the virtual environment.
Displayed are the subject’s starting position (Player), the example route (Correct Route), the
destination (Ring) and the return position (“Sign Off” Door).
Fig. 2. Screenshot of a room used in the navigation task’s environment E4, including an exam-
ple landmark (potted plant) and the countdown timer at the center of the screen (29)
The Combination Environment (E4): An environment and task with both land-
marks as in E2 (but objects ordered differently over rooms) and time constraint as in
E3 (illustrated in Fig. 2.)
3.3 Data Recording and Analysis
Both the order in which a subject would experience the four environments and the
route for each task were chosen random and independent. It was ensured that no two
subjects experienced the same order of routes or order of environments on any of the
20 experimental samplings.
Each time a subject comes in contact with a locked door, this was recorded as one
error. In virtual environments E1 and E2, the time taken to complete the task was
recorded for each route. In environments E3 and E4, a binary indication (pass/fail) for
completion of the task within the time-limit was recorded for each route. Statistical
analyses of the collected data were performed using one-way ANOVA and paired t-
test methods.
4 Conclusions
In review of the experimental results and statistical analyses we conclude that:
(i) The introduction of landmarks in a virtual environment is significantly benefi-
cial for time to complete the navigation task by females (statistically significant, p <
0.01), without impairing that of men (Fig. 3.) It also dramatically decreases female
error counts when no time-pressure is applied, whilst also decreasing male error
counts (Fig. 5.) Landmarks are therefore an addition we propose to make in designing
gender-neutral virtual (training) environments and GPS-based navigation aids.
(ii) The introduction of time-pressure benefits men immensely (Fig. 4), as it dra-
matically raises their success rate to complete the task within 60 seconds (statistically
significant, p < 0.05). Although female task completion rates appear to benefit from
time pressure (environment E3), their lowering in the combined environment E4 re-
mains unexplained (Fig. 4.)
(iii) Although introduction of landmarks does not increase men’s task completion
success rate under time pressure (Fig. 4, male bars E3 and E4), the number of errors
made decreases substantially (Fig. 5.) Men appear to make use of landmarks when
time-pressure is introduced. The decrease in number of errors made in E4, when com-
pared to no landmarks and no time-pressure (E1), is statistically significant.
Most importantly, we believe that our findings contribute to the design of gender-
neutral virtual environments through which users navigate. This is achieved by dem-
onstrating the need for distinguishable landmarks and its effects on both males and
females. Furthermore, inclusion of visual landmarks in car navigation systems, for
example, could greatly benefit use by females without impairing use by males. Also,
our study sheds light on a novel aspect of virtual environments, by examining the
effects for both sexes of time-pressure on the spatial cognition in such environments.
We are fully aware of the small sample sizes and its effect on statistical significance.
Since greater sample sizes were not feasible in the short time-range of this student
project, further study with larger subject groups is recommended.
Fig. 3. Average task completion times (in seconds) for females and males, in virtual environ-
ments without landmarks (E1) and with landmarks (E2)
Fig. 4. Female and male task completion success rates for the different virtual environments
(E1 ... E4). Shown vertically are average ratios of successful task completion under 60 seconds.
Fig. 5. Average female and male error counts for the different virtual environments (E1 ... E4).
Errors are counted as attempts to enter locked doors in the maze.
References
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der differences in human cognition, pp. 52–80. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1997)
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The Effects of Virtual Weather on Presence
Bartholomäus Wissmath1,2, David Weibel1,2, and Fred W. Mast1

1
Department of Psychology, University of Berne, Muesmattstrasse 45, 3000 Bern 9,
Switzerland
wissmath@psy.unibe.ch
2
Swiss Universitary, Institute of Distance Education, Ueberlandstrasse 12, 3900 Brig,
Switzerland
Abstract. In modern societies people tend to spend more time in front of com-
puter screens than outdoors. Along with an increasing degree of realism dis-
played in digital environments, simulated weather appears more and more real-
istic and more often implemented in digital environments. Research has found
that the actual weather influences behavior and mood. In this paper we experi-
mentally examine the effects of virtual weather on the sense of presence.
Thereby we found individuals (N=30) to immerse deeper in digital environ-
ments displaying fair weather conditions than in environments displaying bad
weather. We also investigate whether virtual weather can influence behavior.
The possible implications of theses findings for presence theory as well as digi-
tal environment designers will be discussed.
Keywords: computer game, virtual weather, weather effects, tele-presence,

performance.
Introduction
Weather is an important factor in everyday life: Almost all newscasts contain
weather forecasts, the actual weather determines the way we dress, and many con-
versations start with comments about the actual weather. In terms of lay psychol-
ogy, weather is assumed to have an important impact on mood and behavior [1],[2].
Although people in industrialized countries spend on average 93% of their time
inside [3], the effects weather can have on mood, cognition, behavior, and the fre-
quency of diseases are still evident (cf. [4]). Modern people spend much more time
inside their homes and are exposed to an increasing amount of media influences:
According to the Middletown media studies which aim to assess the media usage in
the United States [5], the average time spent in front of the television is between
278 and 350 minutes per day. Computers are used between 85 and 199 minutes per
day and thus making computers the second important media device. The reasons for
computer usage are diverse: Work and leisure, communication or gaming. The latter
are enjoying a particularly fast-growing popularity: The average time spent with
playing computer games is up to 154 minutes a day [5]. There are more and more
people, especially adolescents, who spend plenty of their time in front of computer
screens playing games (cp. [6]).
The Effects of Virtual Weather on Presence 69
We see at least three reasons why the investigation of the potential effects of vir-
tual weather are an important field of study. First, we think that it is necessary to
explore if virtual weather has similar psychological effects as real weather. This
would be highly relevant for users as well as for digital environment designers. Sec-
ond, we believe that the understanding of presence might grow if the sensation of
presence is stronger in mediated environments displaying fair weather conditions than
in environments displaying bad weather. Last but not least, investigating the effects of
virtual weather in well-controlled studies can help to better understand the psycho-
logical effects of physical weather.
Weather and Behavior

Humans adapt after a period of exposure to local climate and weather conditions. There-
fore, all usual activities can be performed under various circumstances through a wide
range of weather conditions [7]. Thus, the influence of weather on human behavior has
been shown in various contexts. Zacharias, Stathopoulos and Hanqing [8] investigated
the influence of microclimate in terms of sunlight, temperature, and wind on presence at
public plazas. Thereby, temperature and intensity of sunlight determine amount and
behavior of the people present at plazas. Other research has found high temperatures
and violent behavior to be related [9],[10], although it is not clear whether this relation
results from more outdoor presence under good weather conditions [11] or from in-
creased aggression as a consequence of high temperatures [9].
The effect of the local weather on stock prices from exchanges has been shown by
Saunders [12]. Against the assumption of a rational market, the major stock indices rise
with sunny weather and diminish when the sky is cloudy. Weather effects are not only
affecting professional traders but also ordinary consumers. In his investigation of the
associations between daily weather and daily shopping behavior, Parsons concludes that
the weather influences the initial decision of whether to shop or not [13]. Once the con-
sumer is inside the store, other weather variables such as humidity and sunshine hours
may affect the mood of the consumers and thus their shopping behavior.
Weather also affects driving behavior. Edwards found drivers to slow down in
misty or rainy conditions compared to when the weather is good [14]. Even though
the reduction in speed is significant it is interesting that the average speed-reduction is
often too little and therefore only a gesture of appreciating the increased risk of driv-
ing under adverse conditions rather than a sufficient measure to efficiently cope with
the increased risk [14].
Weather and Mood

The relation of weather and mood has been frequently investigated. Sanders and
Brizzolara found low levels of humidity to be associated with good mood [15]. Simi-
larly, high levels of sunlight [16],[17], high barometric pressure [18], and high tem-
peratures are related with good mood [16],[19]. In contrast, high temperatures have
also been associated with low mood [18]. However, Clark and Watson [20] as well as
Watson [2] failed to find relations between mood and daily weather. Keller et al. [4]
provide an explanation for the mixed results. One factor moderating the influence of
temperature and sunlight is season: Increasing temperatures in spring are generally
appreciated, whereas the aggravation of a heat wave in summer results in lowered
mood. In addition, Keller et al. found people resent having to stay indoors (e.g. due to
70 B. Wissmath, D. Weibel, and F.W. Mast
their work) when the weather is pleasant, whereas those who can benefit from good
weather outside experience an improvement of their mood.
Seasonal Effects
Seasonal changes in mood and behavior, also known as seasonality, have been exten-
sively studied. Rosenthal was the first to describe the seasonal affective disorder
(SAD) [21]. This disease is a form of depression with onset in fall or winter and re-
covery in spring. Along with low mood, atypical symptoms like prolonged sleep,
weight gain or carbohydrate craving are common. Seasonal variations are not only
observed in people suffering from SAD but also experienced by the general popula-
tion. Harmatz et al. found that mood reaches a low point in the winter [22]. Additional
evidence for the lowered mood in winter is provided by Dam, Jakobsen, and Mellerup
who found that about 50% of the normal population show a minor degree of SAD
symptoms during northern winters [23]. As exposure to sunlight and artificial bright
light effectively treats SAD [24], deprivation of light is assumed to cause SAD. A
mood improving and vitalizing impact of artificial sunlight has been shown even for
non-depressed people [25]. Effects are often observed immediately after the first
exposition to sunlight [26].
Virtual Environments and Presence

With the development of virtual environments the question to what extent an individ-
ual actually feels located in these worlds emerged. Thus, Minsky [27] coined the term
telepresence to describe the state of consciousness that gives the impression of being
physically present in a technically mediated environment. We think that presence is a
core concept to investigate the psychological impact of virtual environments in gen-
eral and of virtual weather in particular. According to Lombard and Ditton presence is
a perceptual illusion of non-mediation [28]. Sadowski and Stanney describe presence
as a belief that one has left the physical environment and feels ‘present’ in a virtual
environment [29]. This sensation is related to immersion. According to Steuer, im-
mersion can be categorized along two dimensions: the breadth of immersion (i.e.
number of sensory channels involved) and the depth of immersion (i.e. resolution of
the stimulus) [30]. In the last decades vast socio-technological developments have
emerged. Virtual environments that mimic parts or aspects of the physical world are
becoming more and more popular. Nowadays millions of users plunge into virtual
worlds such as World of Warcraft, Second Life, or Google Earth. These environments
are in most cases accessible via personal computers. Increasing bandwidth and pro-
gress in computer graphics as well as tough competition among developers have re-
sulted in the rapid evolution of visually compelling virtual environments.
However, the two dimensions of immersiveness described above are not the only
ones to influence the sensations of presence. Sacau, Laarni and Hartmann pointed out
that not only media factors but also user factors determine the sensation of presence
[31]. Among those they identified the individual’s cognitive abilities, domain specific
interest, spatial visual imagery, and willingness to suspend disbelief. Recently, Wirth
et al. developed a process two-level model of spatial presence [32] which integrates
user and media characteristics. Another central presence model was introduced by
Riva, Waterworth and Waterworth [33]. It is based on Damasio’s [34] model of the
self and includes three conceptual layers of presence. The authors emphasize the im-
portance of the link between presence and emotion [33].
Virtual Environments and Weather

The designers of three-dimensional digital worlds have ultimate design options. They
chose the shape of the virtual environment—the scenery could be a medieval market
place or a modern city centre, a moon crater as well as a coronary vessel. One of the
main aims of the designers is a high degree of realism, which is believed to be re-
quired to immerse the user in a visually convincing environment [35]. For this pur-
pose, designers often implement weather conditions in their applications. Evidently,
implementing virtual weather features is not appropriate for all environments when a
high degree of realism is intended. The coronary vessel for example should be more
convincing with high-resolution textures and realistic shadowing than with any virtual
weather effect. In contrast, for “outdoor” environments the virtual weather effects
should increase perceived realism of the scene. So far, various virtual weather effects
have been developed. For example, fog rendering reduces the observable depth in the
scene and snowfall can be realistically represented by means of particle systems [35].
However, more common weather conditions in VEs are fair weather (sunlight),
cloudy sky and rain. To our knowledge, the psychological effects of virtual weather
have not been investigated yet.
Hypothesis
The sensation of presence depends on user as well as media characteristics [31]. In
combination with the close relationship between presence and affect [33] the motiva-
tion to plunge into a VR should therefore depend on the virtual weather conditions as
real weather conditions influence mood [15][16][17][18][19]. In addition, there might
be an even more direct effect: In the physical environment, people avoid to be ex-
posed to bad weather conditions [8]. This might also apply for virtual environments as
the sensation of presence implies the departure from the physical environment and the
arrival in the mediated environment [29]. As digital media devices are typically lo-
cated inside, the sensation of presence in virtual environments displaying bad weather
conditions would result in leaving a dry space and experiencing adverse virtual
weather conditions. Hence, we present the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis: Fair virtual weather conditions increase feelings of presence,
whereas bad virtual weather conditions decrease feelings of presence.
Method
Design
In this study a between subjects design was used. Participants played a computer
game. The independent variable weather condition had two levels: fair weather and
rainy weather. The dependent variables were presence, breaks in presence and gaming
performance.
Participants
A sample of 30 individuals participated in the experiment. Mean age was 28.2 years
(SD = 5.23); with a range from 18 to 37 years. The majority (76.5%) of the partici-
pants were male. Participants were free to end their participation whenever they
wanted.
Materials
We used a commonly available desktop PC running the racing-game “Superbike

World Championship“ [36] which allows for setting the weather condition in advance
(cp. Fig 1 and Fig 2). The racing track used in this experiment was “Phillip Island“.
All participants used the same motorbike (“Ducati”). This game and the particular
track were chosen because it can be played by operating the keyboard arrow keys. In
addition, in a pre-test, we found the game appealing to novice and expert players
alike. More importantly, driving characteristics (i.e. acceleration, deceleration, maxi-
mum velocity, and road grip) turned out to be equal in both weather conditions. In
addition, even if a crash occurs, the game can be continued. The only consequences of
falling off the bike are longer lap times. Another argument for this game was the fact
that riding a motorcycle typically implies being more exposed to the weather condi-
tions than steering a car.
Fig. 1. Fair weather condition

Fig. 2. Bad weather condition
Procedure
All participants were individually tested. When the participants entered the labora-
tory, the computer was already running and the game weather settings window was
open but not visible to the participant. Participants were assured confidentiality and
anonymity of their data and they filled out a demographic questionnaire. Participants
were also asked about their gaming habits on a seven-point-scale (0 = “never”; 6 =
“daily”). Then, participants were assigned to the two experimental conditions so that
the two groups were matched for gaming experience according to the 7-point assess-
ment. One experimenter welcomed the participant and administered the demographics
questionnaire. The second experimenter chose the adequate weather condition accord-
ing to the gaming experience indicated by the participant. Then, the participant was
guided to the computer and instructed. After three test rounds to familiarize with the
steering interface and racing track, the task would begin. The aim was to complete as
fast as possible five rounds on the racetrack. There was no time limit. Mean time
needed to complete the five rounds was at 9.4 minutes (SD = 1.3). After having com-
pleted the race the participants filled out the presence questionnaire. Only after the
experiment, the purpose of the study was mentioned.
Dependent Variables and Measures
Presence. An adaptation of the Dinh presence scale was used [37]. This instrument
was developed in the context of an extensive investigation of physical presence in
virtual environments depending on the sensory richness of the display and consists of
13 items (Example items: In general, how realistic did the virtual world appear to
you?; How strong was your sense of "being there" in the virtual environment?). It
adopts the items of established measures [38] and was found to be valid for the as-
sessment of presence. However, the internal consistency of the scale is not reported
[37]. For this investigation, a major advantage of this instrument was the fact that the
items fit very well the gaming experience. Participants provided their judgments on
seven-point scales (1 = “not at all”; 7 = “very much”).
Attention allocation. The entire test time was video recorded. As Bracken suggests
[39], we coded for breaks in presence when eye fixations were outside display. This
measure serves as indicator for the attention allocation as an increased amount of
fixations outside the display is inversely related to the sensation of presence.
Performance. The time the participants needed to complete five rounds on the race
track was assessed using the time measurement features embedded in the game.
Results
To analyze our hypothesis predicting increased presence in a virtual environment

displaying fair weather and decreased presence in environments displaying bad
weather we calculated independent samples t-tests. As predicted, for the first presence
indictor—the presence questionnaire score—fair virtual weather (M = 4.33; SD = .63)
resulted in stronger sensations of presence than bad virtual weather (M = 3.95; SD =
.42). As in this case Levene’s test for equality of variances turns out to be significant
(F = 4.96; p = .03), we report the t-test for equal variances not assumed, t(24.48) =
1.97; p = .03, d = .71, (one-tailed), thus corroborating our hypothesis.
Table 1. Bivariate correlations
DV Presence Breaks in Racing

Presence Time
Presence – -.10 .33*
Breaks in Presence – -.33*
Racing Time –
Note: * < .05, one-tailed.

The second indicator for presence—attention allocation towards the display—

showed the same pattern of result. Based on behavioral data, this further corroborates
our hypothesis. Fair virtual weather resulted in less breaks in presence in terms of
fixations outside the display (M = 5.36; SD = .57) than bad virtual weather (M = 5.93;
SD = .87), t(26) = -2.05, p = .03, d = .78, (one-tailed).
We further analyzed the performance in terms of time needed to complete the five
rounds. The results revealed no difference between the two conditions fair virtual
weather (M = 9.37; SD = 1.30) and bad virtual weather (M = 9.44; SD = 1.35), t(28) =
-.14, p = .89, d = .05, (two-tailed).
For exploratory reasons, bivariate correlations between presence, breaks in pres-
ence, and racing time were calculated (cp. Table 1). Thereby, increased sensations of
presence were associated with longer racing times and more breaks in presence re-
sulted in faster racing times. In addition, there was a tendency that fewer breaks in
presence led to higher presence levels.
Discussion
Although nowadays many virtual and digital environments simulate weather phenom-
ena, the impact of virtual rainfall or sunlight has not yet been explored. Our result
suggests that virtual weather can be an important determinant of presence and should
therefore be further considered by VE designers as well as VR-researchers.
Media characteristics such as immersiveness were found to influence the sensation
of presence. Virtual weather can be considered as a media characteristic. In the real
environment, fair weather conditions are associated with positive mood whereas in
the context of gaming presence and positive mood are positively related. Correspond-
ingly, the virtual weather characteristics influenced our participants as if the weather
was real. Similar to the physical environment, our participants avoided to mentally
locate themselves in a virtual environment with adverse weather conditions. Most
noteworthy, the results from this study are not only based on subjective ratings but
also on observable behavior in terms of attention allocation towards the game.
In addition, the driving speed was equal in both conditions. This further indicates
that the two weather conditions did not result in different driving characteristics.
Hence, the differences in the sensations of presence can be attributed to the virtual
weather being the only difference between the two conditions.
In this study, we also raised the question if virtual weather has similar behavioral
implications as real weather. In real life, drivers slow down when they have to drive
under rainy weather conditions. In our virtual environment, however, the weather
condition did not influence driving speed. This could result from the fact that com-
puter games are often played because actions, which would be dangerous in real life,
can be taken without any serious consequences. In the game used here, an accident is
by no means a physical or financial threat as it would be in real life. However, this
does not implicate that our participants did not experience presence. Further evidence
for this conclusion comes from the score levels of the presence questionnaires.
A noteworthy exploratory finding is that the subjective presence ratings are nega-
tively related to the racing performance. A possible explanation could be that more
experienced gamers experienced less presence in that particular game because it was
not challenging enough. In contrast, the less experienced gamers had stronger sensa-
tions of presence due to novelty and performed worse due to lack of training. Another
point for this interpretation is that more breaks in presence were related to faster rac-
ing times. This could further indicate that experienced gamers still had attentional
resources available and thus outperformed the inexperienced gamers.
This study has several limitations, which we want to describe here. One important
point is that we used a somewhat out of date racing game. In newer games the virtual
weather is connected with corresponding driving characteristics. Thus, as a conse-
quence the virtual weather effects were not as natural as they would be in a more
advanced environment. However, if virtual weather even matters in such an environ-
ment, then we would expect stronger effects in current environments. Yet another
point is the actual physical weather. We did not include it as a factor in our design
because our sample is too small to study possible interactions between physical and
virtual weather. A more representative sample could further strengthen the confidence
in our findings.
Future research should directly look at the effects of virtual weather in terms of
emotions and mood. If there is as similar effect of virtual weather on emotions and
mood, then digital environment designers should consider implementing appropriate
weather for the mood they want to induce. A scary online game might be even more
compelling with bad virtual weather whereas a virtual work environment displaying
fair weather conditions might help to prevent signs of seasonal affective disorder in
someone who suffers from northern winters.
Replications of this study could be highly relevant for the developers and users of
many virtual environments applications such as online-marketing, cyber-therapy,
online gaming, or e-learning. Thereby digital and virtual environments displaying the
individually preferred weather conditions could be an increasingly attractive alterna-
tive to the physical environment.
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Complexity of Virtual Worlds’ Terms of Service
Holger M. Kienle1 , Andreas Lober2 , Crina A. Vasiliu3 , and Hausi A. Müller1

1
University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
{kienle,hausi}@cs.uvic.ca
2
RAe Schulte Riesenkampff, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
alober@schulte-lawyers.de
3
University of Victoria MBA Alumni, Victoria, BC, Canada
crina.vasiliu@alumni.uvic.ca
Abstract. This paper explores Terms of Service agreements of virtual

worlds from the perspective of user complexity. We argue that these
terms are too complicated for the average user to fully understand and
manage because they exhibit a high technical or legal complexity. We also
point out complexity problems that are grounded in size and readability
of the texts, keeping track of changes when the terms evolve, and the
scope of the terms. Based on these observations we identify approaches
to reduce the complexity of Terms of Service agreements.
Keywords: virtual worlds, terms of service, legal statements, readabil-

ity scores.
1 Introduction
This paper explores the complexity of Terms of Service (ToS) and other related
legal statements that the ToS refers to. Operators of virtual worlds post the
ToS on their web sites; it can be seen as a contract between the operator of the
virtual world and its users. The goal of this paper is to explore and understand
the complexity of the ToS, but not to analyze it from a legal perspective. Thus,
we here take the content of the ToS at face value.
The ToS is important from the users’ perspective because the operators use
the ToS to put restrictions on users’ rights and conduct. Thus, users have to read
and understand the ToS in order to assess their rights and obligations. Generally,
the complexity of these rights and obligations increases with the complexity of
the virtual world. For example, if the virtual world has a virtual economy with
an in-world currency that can be converted into real currency, then the ToS may
have to address issues such as taxation and gambling. If the world offers user-
generated content, the ToS has to deal with the IP rights of the content creator
as well as in-world copyright and trademark infringements. Furthermore, the
more users are investing in a virtual world (e.g., in terms of spent time, depth
of social immersion, creation of (privacy-sensitive) content, or accumulation of
virtual assets), the more important it becomes for them to understand the ToS.
Not understanding or following the ToS can result in the unwanted exposure of
private data, loss of virtual assets, or termination of the access by the operator.

80 H.M. Kienle et al.
For the following discussion, we analyze the ToS of five virtual worlds: Habbo
Hotel (www.habbo.com), Kaneva (www.kaneva.com), moove (www.moove.com),
Second Life (secondlife.com), and There.com (www.there.com). All analyzed
virtual worlds have in common the fact that they can be characterized as meta-
verses that have no explicit (game-related) goals for the user and thus are in
contrast to massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) that are emphasizing
game-related activities such as leveling, fighting, or winning.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we first summarize the kinds
of legal topics that can be found in the five virtual worlds’ ToS and structure
the topics based on two criteria, relevance and complexity. We then assess in
Section 3 the complexity of the ToS with the help of size and readability metrics,
and point out other sources of complexity. In Section 4 we discuss how operators
try to alleviate ToS complexity and propose other possible approaches. Section 5
concludes the paper with recommendations and observations.
2 Legal Topics of Terms of Service

Operators expect users to read the entire ToS. They presumably also expect
users to understand what they read. Indeed, Habbo Hotel explicitly says that
“if you do not understand . . . these Terms of Use, do not use the Services”.
However, it is not realistic to expect users to understand all aspects of the ToS.
To illustrate this point, here is a sentence from Habbo Hotel’s ToS in the section
Your Content:1
“Sulake has no obligation to monitor or enforce your intellectual property
rights to your User Content but has the right to protect and enforce its
and its licensees’ licensed rights to your User Content, including, without
limitation, by bringing and controlling actions in your name and on
your behalf (at Sulake’s cost and expense, to which you hereby consent
and irrevocably appoint Sulake as your attorney-in-fact, with the power
of substitution and delegations, which appointment is coupled with an
interest).”
The above sentence exhibits a high complexity in terms of legal terminology,
addressing such diverse issues as intellectual property, licensing, and power of
attorney.
To better understand the content covered by the ToS of a virtual world,
Table 1 lists the legal topics that are typically addressed based on the five virtual
worlds under discussion.2 To better understand the sources of content complexity
for the user, we roughly structure the topics that are addressed by a ToS along
two dimensions: relevance and complexity. Relevance expresses how important
it is for a “typical user” to understand a certain topic covered by the ToS.
1
http://www.habbo.com/papers/termsAndConditions
2
Table 1 is not comprehensive; for instance, it omits age constraints and refund poli-
cies. On the other hand, one might argue that privacy policy and behavioral guide-
lines are not part of the ToS proper.
Complexity of Virtual Worlds’ Terms of Service 81
Table 1. Complexity/relevance matrix of topics covered by ToS
Relevance
Complexity
low medium high
low external linking, ToS changes, registra- behavior guidelines,
advertising tion information password conduct
medium impersonation, dispute resolution, privacy policy,
jurisdiction DMCA process account closure
high reverse engineering, warranty and liability, copyright,
spyware indemnity virtual currency
Complexity addresses the required legal or technical background of the reader

to fully understand the topic.3 It may be helpful for operators to think in terms
of relevance and complexity when drafting and structuring their ToS.
Topics with low relevance are unlikely to affect users with normal usage pat-
terns. This is obvious for activities that go beyond the normal use of the software
such as reverse engineering and the attempt to introduce spyware. We also assign
low relevance to topics that users presumably already are aware of or expect. For
example, users presumably understand that pretending to be a representative
of the operator is not acceptable behavior, and that links that point to other
web sites are outside the control of the operator. We assign the issue of juris-
diction a low relevance based on the expectation that users rarely initiate legal
proceedings against the operator.
Topics with medium relevance may affect users with normal usage patterns,
but this is seldom the case. For example, users may get involved in legal issues
(e.g., a false DMCA notification) without any wrong-doings. Also, it appears to
be rarely the case that a change in the ToS directly affects the average user. It
is unlikely—rather sadly—that a user expects the software to operate flawlessly
and thus would try to pursue claims of warranty and liability; however, this
scenario becomes more likely for content loss of valuable virtual assets.
Topics with high relevance can affect the user during normal usage. For ex-
ample, monitoring of user behavior is pervasive because in most virtual worlds
users can complain about other users if they object to their conduct. Repeated
misconduct by a user can lead to account closure with or without refund de-
pending on the operator’s policy. Privacy is a concern because operators may
constantly accumulate personal data that from then on remains indefinitely in
the system. If the virtual world allows user-generated content, copyright issues
are becoming more relevant and more complex for users.
Topics with low complexity can be understood by users without expert knowl-
edge. For example, behavior guidelines are written in straightforward prose and
use terminology that can be readily understood. Medium-complexity topics re-
quire some basic knowledge of legal or technical issues. For example, to under-
stand privacy one needs to know about technical concepts such as cookie and
3
Note that a legal statement can be relatively easy to understand, but that its legal
interpretation may be highly complex.
Table 2. Summary of the complexity metrics of virtual worlds’ ToS
Virtual World Version Words Reading Time Sentences SMOG FRES

Habbo Hotel5 6/13/08 7388 29:33 243 14.6 46.4
Kaneva6 5/20/08 4439 17:45 140 13.8 52.5
moove7 – 1120 4:29 58 12.9 49.8
Second Life8 – 7286 29:08 219 14.6 42.0
There.com9 – 5257 21:01 185 14.3 47.5
average 5088 20:21 169 14.0 47.6
IP address. The DMCA process requires a basic understanding of the concept of

copyright. Topics with high complexity require expert knowledge. For example,
there are a number of legal issues that relate to licensing. The average user does
not know the difference between license and sale, and what is meant by an “un-
restricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual fully-paid
and royalty-free right and license” (Habbo Hotel). In Kaneva, the world’s virtual
currency “is a limited license right available for purchase or free distribution at
Kaneva’s discretion.” As a result, a virtual currency is quite different from real
currency even though to the user it may seem the same.
3 Complexity of Terms of Service

In order to gain a better understanding of the structural complexity of ToS, we
have analyzed the five ToS with the help of a number of metrics (cf. Table 2).
The metrics have been computed with the GNU style tool, Version 1.11.4 All
ToS have been accessed in February 2009.
We are not the first ones to analyze legal documents published on the Inter-
net with the help of text analysis techniques. For example, Antón et al. have
analyzed 40 privacy policies from nine web sites in the financial sector, including
readability scores [1]. Antón et al. also conducted an analysis of privacy state-
ments in the health care domain to find out whether the Health Information
and Portability Accountability Act10 (HIPAA) had an impact on these state-
ments [2]. They compare readability scores of two snapshots (Summer 2000 and
September 2003) of nine web sites corresponding to points in time before and
after HIPAA went into effect, and found that HIPAA’s introduction has made
statements more difficult to read. Kienle and Vasiliu have studied the evolution
of legal statements of different kinds of web sites by tracking five snapshots be-
tween 1998 and 2006 [3]. They found that the length of legal texts increased
4
www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
5
http://www.habbo.com/papers/termsAndConditions
6
http://www.kaneva.com/overview/TermsAndConditions.aspx
7
http://www.moove.com/agreement_rn.htm
8
http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php
9
http://webapps.prod.there.com/help/74.xml
10
http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/
significantly over the years (presumably following a logarithmic trend). For ex-
ample, over the years the average word count for legal texts of e-business sites
increased from 1,249 words in 1998 to 5,195 in 2006.
In the following, we first discuss two complexity metrics (size and readability
scores) and then address concerns regarding the evolution and scope of the ToS.
3.1 Size
A simple metric is the size of the ToS with respect to the number of words and
sentences. Both metrics are given in Table 2 at the “Words” and “Sentences”
columns, respectively. Except for moove, all worlds’ ToS have well over 100
sentences and several thousand words.
The length of a ToS directly translates to the time that it takes the user to
read through it. Assuming an average speed of 250 words per minute (which is
typical for a completed secondary education) [4], reading a ToS takes between
4:29 and 29:33 minutes (cf. Table 2, “Reading Time”). Since an average reading
speed of 250 assumes non-technical content, it can be seen as the lower bound
of the time that it takes to read a ToS. In practice, reading and comprehending
a ToS may take significantly longer depending on the individual user [4].
3.2 Readability
There are several well-known readability tests that determine how easy it is to
read and comprehend a text. The advantage of readability scores is that they
can be automatically computed. However, they cannot assess the difficulty of
the subject area of the text for a reader [5].

The SMOG formula assesses the educational level needed to understand a text
[6]. It is computed with p 30 s + 3, where p denotes the number of poly-syllables
(i.e., three or more syllables) and s denotes the number of sentences. The average
SMOG readability score is 14.0 for the five ToS (cf. Table 2, “SMOG”), which
according to the SMOG Calculator11 corresponds to the New York Times and
requires a college education level (SMOG 13-15).
Another popular readability measure is the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES).
With FRES, lower numbers mean increasing difficulty. It is computed as 206.835−
84.6 wy − 1.015 ws , where y, w, and s denote the total number of syllables, words
and sentences, respectively. Scores in the ranges of 0–30 and 30–50 are rated as
“very difficult” (scientific journals, reading grade 17+) and “difficult” (academic
journals, reading grade 13–16), respectively [5]. The average FRES of the five ToS
is 47.6 (cf. Table 2, “FRES”), while Second Life is the most difficult (42.0) and
Kaneva is the least difficult (52.5). According to Wikipedia, Kaneva’s ToS roughly
compares to the Times magazine.12
In order to judge the complexity of legal texts for virtual worlds it is instructive
to compare them to the complexity of other legal texts on the Internet. Kienle
11
http://www.wordscount.info/hw/smog.jsp
12
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Readability_Test
and Vasiliu have reported SMOG and FRES values for legal texts found on web
sites. For legal texts in the year 2006 they report average scores of 13.51 (SMOG)
and 49.25 (FRES).13 Thus, the readability of legal texts for virtual worlds seems
similar to other legal texts found on web sites.
The readability scores indicate that a ToS is advanced reading material that
is not trivial to understand. According to the SMOG, comprehending a ToS
typically requires a post-secondary education (e.g., college or university). This is
a concern because virtual worlds are open to all kinds of users with diverse ed-
ucational backgrounds. Interestingly, the states of Florida14 and Connecticut15
require that life insurance polices have a FRES of 45 or higher. There are also
laws that require to use plain language in consumer contracts (e.g., the New
York Plain English law) [7]. Thus, it is conceivable that courts will also look
into readability issues when judging the enforceability of a ToS. Currently, the
average complexity of virtual worlds’ ToS is close to a FRES of 45 with Second
Life’s ToS overshooting this complexity mark.16 Also, it may be already prob-
lematic if only parts of the ToS have a high readability score. For example, the
sentence in Habbo Hotel’s ToS quoted at the beginning of Section 2 scores a
SMOG of 23.5 and a FRES of 0! This sentence also has a length of 80 words.
For Connecticut consumer contracts the law states that a contract has to meet
several plain language tests, among them: “No sentence in the contract exceeds
fifty words”.17
3.3 Evolution
Users are expected to constantly monitor the ToS for changes since operators
reserve the right to change them at any time. For example, the following state-
ment is typical: “Kaneva reserves the right, at its discretion, to change, modify,
add, or remove portions of these Terms at any time”. Habbo Hotel simply rec-
ommends in its ToS to “check back each visit as policies and rules may change”
and mandates later on that “you agree to review these Terms of Use on at least
a weekly basis to be aware of Changes”.
Some operators promise a change notification when the user accesses the vir-
tual world for the first time after a change (There.com). Others state that a
notification may be “sent via e-mail” (Kaneva) or more general that the oper-
ator is “communicating these changes through any written contact method we
13
All scores have been computed using the same tool.
14
Florida Insurance Code, Section 627.4145, http://law.onecle.com/florida/
insurance/627.4145.html
15
General Statues of Connecticut, Section 38a-297, http://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/
pub/Chap699a.htm
16
However, a word of caution is in order here since different tools have different al-
gorithms to determine syllables, words and sentences, resulting in different SMOG
and FRES scores [3].
17
General Statues of Connecticut, Section 42-152, http://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/pub/
chap742.htm
Table 3. Summary of virtual world’s legal documents
Virtual World ToS Referenced by ToS Words SMOG FRES

Habbo Hotel Terms The Privacy Policy, The 12708 14.1 47.3
of Use Habbo Way, Terms and
Conditions of Sale, Infringe-
ments Policy
Kaneva Member Terms & Conditions, Pri- 10015 13.1 51.3
Guide- vacy Policy, Copyright Pol-
lines icy, Rules of Conduct
moove Terms Privacy Policy, child pro- 1528 12.8 51.4
of Ser- tection paragraph, Premium
vice Package paragraph
Second Life Terms Privacy Policy, Community >12762 13.8 46.3
of Ser- Standards, DMCA, Brand
vice Center, Second Life Billing
Policies
There.com Member Privacy Policy, Behavior 8591 13.8 48.3
Agree- Guidelines
ment
have established with you” (Second Life), but the ToS is worded such that the
operator is not required to send out these notifications.
Given this situation, it is surprising that only a minority of the ToS are dated
or have some kind of versioning information (cf. Table 2, “Version”). Habbo Hotel
dates the ToS and all related policies. Kaneva dates the Terms & Conditions and
the Privacy Policy, but not its other legal statements.
Since changes are often small (and the previous version of the ToS is no longer
available) users are in a difficult or impossible situation to effectively monitor
changes to the ToS. In contrast, when changing its German User Agreement on
June 3, 2009, PayPal provided a marked up document in advance that clearly
identified new text (blue color) and deleted text (red).18
From the users’ perspective, it would be highly desirable to have advance
notification of a change in the ToS along with a document that clearly identifies
the changes along the lines that PayPal provides.
3.4 Scope
A ToS consists of the ToS proper and related (legal) policies and guidelines that
the ToS refers to. As a result, it is not always obvious what constitutes the ToS
as we will explain shortly.
Table 3 shows the name of the ToS proper (column “ToS”) along with the
documents that are mentioned in it. This means that in effect users are required
to read and understand all of these documents, not just the ToS proper. For
18
https://www.paypal.com/de/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/general/
PayPalPolicyChange-outside
example all legal texts in Kaneva add up to 10015 words, which is more than
twice the amount of the ToS proper. In Second Life, the actual word count
is more than 12762 words because we did follow the Brand Center only two
levels deep and the Billing Policies one level. Compared to Table 2, the reading
complexity tends to be lower for the whole set of documents because some of
them are less technical in nature.
Because legal documents for a virtual word are dispersed over several web
pages, it is not always obvious what truly constitutes the ToS. In Second Life,
the ToS includes the billing policies, but this policy is not listed in the overview
of “Policies & Guidelines” that is displayed alongside the ToS. Furthermore, the
ToS refers to the Brand Center which has a complex structure with links that
go down several levels. Thus, the ToS’s “extent” remains unclear or is difficult
to establish. In Habbo Hotel’s ToS, “you agree to abide by the . . . Terms of Use,
the Habbo Way and any Additional Terms”. However, it is never elaborated
upon what constitutes these additional terms or where they can be found. Thus,
it is not clear if The Fansite Way19 (which spells out rules for private home
pages that use Habbo’s IP) is part of the ToS or not since this policy is never
explicitly mentioned. In moove, both privacy policy and security information
are given on the same web page even though the ToS refers only to the privacy
policy. Thus, it is not clear if the user can rely on information provided by the
security information such as “all chat messages are transferred encrypted.”
Given that the ToS is a legal contract that may end up in court, it is surprising
that operators split them up into a set of documents that are not always denoted
clearly.
4 Dealing with Terms of Service Complexity
The previous discussion suggests that most ToS are difficult to comprehend
for most users. While most users happily visit a virtual world without every
conflicting with the ToS, there is always the risk that users are surprised by
actions of the operator that are grounded and justifiable by the ToS.
Operators have tried several approaches to explain the meaning of the ToS
and to reduce the complexity of understanding the ToS:
Summarization: Some operators provide a summary that highlights the key

elements of the ToS. There.com provides a highlights list before the actual
ToS while clarifying that “it is, however, important that you read and un-
derstand the FULL Member Agreement”. Kaneva’s Member Guidelines give
“good general rules to follow” in the form of “DO’s” and “DON’Ts”. Habbo
Hotel starts its ToS with a Basic Summary followed by a Long Version.
Customer support: There.com says in its ToS that “if you should have any
questions regarding the Member Agreement, you may reach Customer Sup-
port”.
19
http://www.habbo.com/help/84
FAQ: A list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) can be used to address com-
mon problems. Second Life appends a FAQ after their DMCA policy. They
also have a FAQ about the use of their trademarks. Habbo Hotel has a short
FAQ following its behavioral guidelines, The Habbo Way.
Forum: Some operators have forums and mailing lists that allow users to post
questions regarding the ToS. Second Life has forums and mailing lists where
legal experts from Linden Lab may choose to answer questions.20
While the above approaches aim at reducing complexity and increasing under-
standing, they are not without potential pitfalls for both users and operators. It
is not clear if summary statements are actually part of the ToS and thus legally
binding or only there for information purposes. The highlights list in There.com
features a bullet point that says “Are you not a minor? What are you waiting
for? Come on in!” This gives the impression of reading an advertisement rather
than reading a legally binding document. If the summary statement contradicts
other parts of the ToS, it is not clear which one will take precedence. Similarly, it
is not clear if a FAQ is part of the ToS. If the FAQ is not contained in a separate
web page apart from the ToS, users may get the impression that this is indeed
the case. While giving users the opportunity to ask questions to customer ser-
vice regarding the ToS is a good idea in principle, it seems unlikely that service
personnel have the necessary expertise.
The matrix in Table 1 shows that not all topics are equally relevant for users.
Thus, the ToS could be restructured to emphasize topics with high relevance
and to de-emphasize other topics. Furthermore, operators can provide interac-
tive tools that help the user to analyze the ToS. An example of such a tool is
the EULA Analyzer,21 which inspects End-User License Agreements (EULAs)
with the goal to identify clauses that are of particular concern to users. Once
the agreement is pasted into a text box, the analyzer provides metrics such as
word count, number of sentences, and readability scores. Furthermore, selected
sentences are highlighted and annotated to provide guidance for humans. Simi-
larly, operators could provide an interactive tool that allows the users to quickly
focus on the parts of the ToS that are most relevant for them, thus cutting down
on users’ reading time and improving cost-effectiveness. Such a tool could also
operate based on user profiles or conduct.
Currently the ToS is static and equally applies to all users regardless of their
needs. Operators may want to think about customizable license schemes that are
tailored to user characteristics and preferences. Examples of flexible licensing
schemes are provided by Creative Commons22 and the Adaptive Public License23 .
Straightforward customization of licenses can be based on data provided by the
user such as account type, age, and residency. For example, if users are not creat-
ing content in the virtual world, corresponding parts in the ToS related to copy-
right and ownership issues can be omitted. On the other hand, a customized ToS
20
https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo
21
http://www.spywareguide.com/analyze/
22
http://creativecommons.org/
23
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/apl1.0.php
may pose additional uncertainty for the individual user because he or she can no
longer assume that more sophisticated users or consumer protectors have analyzed
the ToS for them and have intervened on their behalf. For example, when Adobe
released a beta version of Photoshop Express (a web-based photo-editing applica-
tion), sophisticated users quickly complained about unfavorable conditions in its
license that essentially gave Adobe the right to use uploaded pictures from users
in many ways.24 These user complains prompted Adobe to revise the license.
Furthermore, there is the difficulty of revising customizable licenses. If the
operators wants to conduct a change in the ToS, all customizable licenses need to
be suitably modified and communicated to the user. Also, the less sophisticated
users would be at a disadvantage because they would not automatically profit
from the revised ToS if they had entered into a customized license agreement.
Generally, in case of contradictory terms, an individual agreement will have
priority over general terms and conditions.
Sophisticated customizable licenses are only feasible if they can be negotiated
(semi-)automatically. To enable this, users and operators could state their policy
needs in machine-readable data for negotiation of a ToS that is acceptable for
both sides. Research in this area is already being pursued in the context of
privacy policies [8]. For example, a user may state that he or she does not want
targeted advertising and the collection of personal data that may come with it.
The operator may accept this under the condition that the user is willing to pay a
monthly fee instead. If both sides reach an agreement on the amount (and related
issues such payment method and cancellation policy) then the custom-tailored
ToS could come into effect.
5 Conclusions
This paper has explored the complexity of ToS by analyzing the ToS of five
virtual worlds (Habbo Hotel, Kaneva, moove, Second Life, and There.com). ToS
are complex in terms of the text size (the average size is more than 5000 words,
which takes an average reader more than 20 minutes to go through), and the
ease of readability (the average ToS requires a post-secondary education). Fur-
thermore, the user has to watch out for changes in the ToS, determine the body
of documents that constitute the ToS, and deal with the legal and technical
complexity of the ToS’s topics.
It is an interesting question whether the complexity problems discussed in
this paper could prompt a court to declare a ToS void. Even though declaring
a ToS void would as a general rule require the ToS as a whole to be intrans-
parent, it cannot be completely ruled out that in some cases a ToS’s complexity
could trigger such a court decision. However, since with regards to consumer
sophistication the benchmark has increased from that of a swift observer to an
attentive and diligent reader, it remains to be seen whether a court would take
such an incisive decision, which could possibly lead to an unforeseeable flood of
user claims and the collapse of whole business models.
24
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/28/adobe_photo_pimping/
In order to reduce legal uncertainty and ambiguity for both parties, we propose
the following simple recommendations (that are surprisingly often violated by
virtual worlds’ ToS):
Legalese: A ToS should use as much straightforward prose as possible and as

little legalese as necessary. More concrete requirements for plain English can
be found in several state laws (e.g., New York, Connecticut, or Pennsylvania).
Generally, it seems advisable for operators to check that the complexity of
their own ToS is not much worse than that of their competitors or other
related legal texts.
Versioning: A ToS should contain versioning information (e.g., a date or unique
number) so that different versions can be readily identified by users.
Comparison of Versions: Operators should support the user in identifying
changes that have been made for a new ToS version. This could be achieved
with a marked-up document or a summary of the changes.
Ambiguity in Scope: It should be readily apparent which web pages—or parts
thereof—constitute the ToS. Sources of ambiguity are hyperlinks to other parts
of the web site, FAQs, and (informal) summaries.
It seems clear that an ordinary user cannot be expected to fully comprehend the
ToS of a virtual world. It is surprising that courts have so far ignored indications
that most users are not reading the ToS and that this reluctance can be mostly
explained with the fact that the form of most current ToS is inadequate to
succinctly convey relevant information to the user in a cost-effective manner.
Given this situation, operators may want to look for novel approaches on how
to represent and enforce the ToS, and how to negotiate and contract the ToS.
Interactive tools that help users to analyze the ToS and to semi-automatically
negotiate a customizable license may be able to alleviate some of the present
complexity concerns.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their thought-provoking comments.
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The Role of Semantics in Next-Generation
Online Virtual World-Based Retail Store
Geetika Sharma, C. Anantaram, and Hiranmay Ghosh
Tata Consultancy Services, 249 D & E Udyog Vihar, Phase IV, Gurgaon -122015,
Haryana, India
geetika.s@tcs.com, c.anantaram@tcs.com, hiranmay.ghosh@tcs.com
http://www.tcsinnovations.com
Abstract. Online virtual environments are increasingly becoming popu-

lar for entrepreneurship. While interactions are primarily between avatars,
some interactions could occur through intelligent chatbots. Such interac-
tions require connecting to backend business applications to obtain infor-
mation, carry out real-world transactions etc. In this paper, we focus on
integrating business application systems with virtual worlds. We discuss
the probable features of a next-generation online virtual world-based re-
tail store and the technologies involved in realizing the features of such a
store. In particular, we examine the role of semantics in integrating popu-
lar virtual worlds with business applications to provide natural language
based interactions.
Keywords: Virtual Environments, Natural Language Processing, Vi-

sual Semantics.
1 Introduction
Online web-based retail portals like eBay, Amazon etc., are rather popular for
buying and selling used and new items. People shop online to find discounts and
savings, save time in comparing product specifications and prices, and the sheer
convenience of shopping from their homes or offices. However, online web-based
shopping lacks the social aspect of shopping. A user of an online portal is usually
shopping individually and without social interaction - a practice far removed
from reality. It has been observed that although the majority of consumers still
visit real-world malls to shop, they seem to acknowledge that malls serve other
purposes than being just a shopping destination, such as watching a movie,
shopping with a relative or friend, or attending events [5]. Market research has
also shown that the Internet is not typically a place where consumers make
impulsive purchases. Consumers utilize the web as a convenient, user-friendly
means to browse shopping options, educate themselves on product choices and
make informed purchase decisions.
Online virtual worlds are set to change online shopping by providing the
necessary social aspect to shopping. Friends and relatives distributed across the
globe can go shopping together by logging into the world at the same time and

92 G. Sharma, C. Anantaram, and H. Ghosh
visiting different retail stores. This allows instant feedback from the people whose
opinions matter most to the consumer. Virtual worlds can also provide a three-
dimensional visual interface to shopping. A consumer can look at a model of the
item he wishes to buy from any angle, turn it around and see demonstrations of
its features or how to use that item.
In this paper, we explore the technologies to seamlessly integrate a virtual
environment with a retail application (such as a shopping application) in such
a way that users can interact in a virtual environment, yet have the experience
of real-world shopping. Virtual world interactions, at present, have largely been
between humans, mostly as conversations in free format text, such as chat ses-
sions, message sessions, and discussion platforms. In such a scenario, we would
have to permit free format text interaction with a retail application system so
that the user perceives a natural conversation. Moreover, such an interaction
could lead to a dynamic, customized experience for the user.
We focus on one part of this problem –how to handle the semantics to carry
out free format text and image based interactions with a retail application in
a virtual world, in order to get information from the application system and
to carry out real-world transactions. This problem can be further divided into
two subparts- the first part deals with connecting the virtual world to a retail
system outside its world and the second deals with the semantics to process and
implement tasks requested by the user through natural language conversation
and image-based interaction. We describe how to tackle both the subparts in the
following sections. We have taken an example of a virtual retail store to illustrate
the technologies and their issues.
In section 2, we describe a next-generation virtual world-based retail store.
In Section 3, we describe a prototype system called NATAS which is a text-
based natural language interface to business applications. In section 4, we show
how business systems may be integrated with virtual worlds using NATAS as
an interface. In section 5, we discuss the role of visual semantics in retail stores
and conclude in section 6.
2 A Next Generation Online Virtual World Retail Store
A significant number of people today physically go to a retail store. Prospective

shoppers may interact with the salespersons and may also buy some items from
the store. They have a social interaction with the salespersons (such as, they
may ask details about the items in the store or get help in finding a suitable
item for their need, etc.) and physically see and examine the items in the store.
However, every time a shopper visits a store, he spends a significant amount of
time and energy to shop. Moreover, the store usually remains the same for each
shopper who visits it - there is no personalization of the store for a shopper; that
is, based on a shopper’s particular need on a day, the store’s layout and offerings
do not change. This may lead to poor stock location and poor stock promotions
from a shopper’s point of view.
Virtual Retail Store 93
Online shopping, on the other hand, offers mechanisms through which shop-
pers browse and shop for items on the Internet without visiting a retail store.
However, in such an interaction, which appears rather impersonal, a number of
“desirable” features are missing. From a shopper’s perspective, the first and fore-
most is the lack of social interaction. There is no salesperson / store-assistant to
help the shopper. Second, there is a lack of personalized services (such as guid-
ing the shopper to the appropriate product shelves), or guided shopping facilities
such as “ask a pharmacist”. Further, there is no mechanism for the retail shop
to dynamically alter itself depending on the conversation between the shopper
and the salesperson. In the context of these shortcomings, we discuss some of
the features of a futuristic online virtual world-based retail store.
In an online three-dimensional virtual world, shoppers can visit a store by
logging in with their avatars, going to the store’s location in the virtual world. A
shopper could converse with an avatar (a logged in salesperson) or a virtual store
agent (a natural-language enabled chatbot). The conversation can be in the form
of text-based input or through speech. Moreover, the store items could be altered
for a particular shopper based on the conversation between the shopper and the
avatar or agent. New schemes and promotions deemed suitable for the shopper
can be displayed. Virtual environments, unlike real settings, take seconds to alter,
so the time and cost benefits of this approach, when compared with traditional
mechanism is enormous. This will also enable store planners to provide a rapid
means of presenting their latest store and item concepts to potential shoppers
catering to their taste.
An online virtual world store is a combination of graphical models of objects
such as doors, windows, walls, lights etc. and objects that are on sale inside
the store. These objects can be scripted to behave in a particular way when
an event occurs. For example, walls could be scripted to change their wallpaper
depending on what the customer is interested in. A virtual store also allows the
store planners to adjust the heights of displays, the widths of aisles and the design
of the background. There can be promotional videos playing on different screens
in the store which change depending on the product that a user is interested in.
Retail planning in such a store allows the store to customize product place-
ment in order to encourage shoppers to move to the hotspots along a prede-
termined path suitable to their tastes. This facility helps retailers explore store
design, merchandising and product concepts based on consumer insights without
ever having to change a thing in the real-world store. Shoppers would be able to
present images of items that they would like to buy, and items that match such
images (either fully or partially) can be immediately displayed.
Automated chatbots play an important role to interact with the wide variety
of customers who would “walk-in” into the store. Natural language based inter-
action would be some of the important means of interaction for customers with
chatbots. In the next sections, we examine some of the technologies to perform
the above tasks. In particular we focus on two core technologies - text based nat-
ural language interaction, and role of visual images in retail stores and discuss
the semantics in such a scenario.
3 Framework for Text Based Natural Language

Interaction
A number of attempts have been made to build natural language interfaces to
business applications; some of them are reviewed here. Sybase Inc. has built a
system called “Answers Anywhere” [6], to provide a natural language interface to
a business application through a wireless phone, a handheld PDA, a customized
console, or a desktop computer. The method is based on agents and networks.
While the system shows promise, their approach does not involve ontology based
querying or retrieval. Further, they do not handle semantic description of web
resources, or traversal of the ontology graph. PRECISE NLI system [7] is de-
signed for a broad class of semantically tractable natural language questions,
and guarantees to map each question to the corresponding SQL. The problem
of finding a mapping from a complete tokenization of a question to a set of
database elements such that the semantic constraints are satisfied is reduced
to graph matching problem. PRECISE uses the max-flow algorithm to solve
the problem. While their work seems quite interesting, they restrict each ques-
tion to start with “wh” token. NaLIX system [8] discusses the construction of
a generic Natural Language query interface to an XML database. On the other
hand TRIPS [9] enforces strict turn taking between the user and the system
and processes each utterance sequentially through three stages – interpretation,
dialogue management and generation. These restrictions make the interaction
unnatural [10].
We describe a natural language interface system called NATAS [1] that allows
end-users to interact with a business application by posing questions and invok-
ing tasks in a natural language such as English. It is based on a framework that
uses an explicit domain ontology described using semantic web technology like
Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL) and
SPARQL query language for RDF. NATAS parses an input natural language
sentence and depending on the context, either a SPARQL query is formulated
on the application data, or the relevant APIs of the application are invoked. The
result thus generated is phrased into an English language sentence and displayed
to the user.
3.1 Domain Ontology and Its Creation

NATAS relies on a domain ontology created using OWL, N3 an, to provide a
natural language interface to a business application through a wireless phone,
a handheld PDA, a customized console, or a desktop computer. The method
is based on agents and networks. While the system shows promise, their ap-
proach does not involve ontology based querying or retrieval. Further, they do
not handle semantic description of web resources, or traversal of the ontology
graph. PRECISE NLI system [7] is designed for a broad class of semantically
tractable natural language questions, and guarantees to map each question to
the corresponding SQL. The problem of finding a mapping from a complete to-
kenization of a question to a set of database elements such that the semantic
constraints are satisfied is reduced to graph matching problem. PRECISE uses

the max-flow algorithm to solve the problem. While their work seems quite in-
teresting, they restrict each question to start with “wh” token. NaLIX system [8]
discusses about construction of generic Natural Language query interface to an
XML database. On the other hand TRIPS [9] nforces strict turn taking between
the user and the system and processes each utterance sequentially through three
stages – interpretation, dialogue management and generation. These restrictions
make the interaction unnatural [10].
The framework works on an explicit ontology of the application domain. The
ontology of the domain describes the domain terms and their relationships. The
data in the business application system forms a part of the domain terms and
their relationships in the ontology. This helps forms the main concepts of the
domain and their relationships with a ¡subject-predicate-object¿ structure for
each of the concepts.
We define three levels of the ontology - Seed Ontology, Application On-
tology and Domain Ontology. The Seed Ontology describes the basic relations
between domain terms that are present in the domain. For example in the Retail
domain where details about all the items and their sales promotions are han-
dled; facts like “item has discount”, “item has modelno.”, etc populate the Seed
Ontology.
The application data (also termed as static facts) provides the actual data that
is present in the system. The Ontology Generator takes in the Seed Ontology
and application data and creates an instance of the Seed Ontology populated
by the application data. This is called the Application Ontology. Next, the
rules of the application domain are then evaluated together with the Application
Ontology by a Rule Engine, such as Closed World Machine (CWM), to create
the Domain Ontology. This Domain Ontology is used by the NATAS system
to answer questions on / carry out the tasks of the domain.
We assume that all the instances of the objects in the domain are stored in
a database associated with the application system in a relational form (such as
[a R c]), for example [iPod price 20,000]. A relational database will store it as
a set of tables with rows that have attributes (for example, say, we have table
Price with ItemId and PriceID as fields and rows with values 160 and 212). We
treat the data in the database as static facts of the domain. This data can be
used for answering queries posed by a user.
3.2 Concepts of the Domain

The RDF file is read and a <subject-predicate-object> graph structure in cre-
ated in memory. Once we have the domain ontology in memory, we can traverse
it using the graph traversal functions to get the subject, predicate or object (or
a combination of these). The set of class objects created in memory to represent
each subject, predicate and object of the <subject-predicate-object> structure,
form the concepts of the domain. This helps identify the concepts in the natural
language sentence that the user inputs.
3.3 Parsing the Input to Identify Concepts
The input sentence in natural language is parsed by the Domain Parser for
identifying the parts-of-speech in the sentence. This process identifies the proper
nouns, common nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the sentence, and is called
tagging. Further, the root words for each of the tagged words are determined.
Once this is done, the tagged words with their root-words are then passed onto
the Concept Manager to match against the domain concepts loaded in memory.
The matching is carried out as an approximate match with a threshold greater
than 75% between the words in the tagged input sentence and the concept and
their synonyms. The concepts that match are flagged to indicate that they are
referred by the user in the sentence (this is called referred concepts). The referred
concepts are then used to identify that part of the ontology, which needs to be
traversed. From the <subject-object-predicate> tuples in memory (treated as
facts), the system tries to generate an answer for the referred concepts, or execute
the relevant API of the application.
3.4 Handling Queries on the Domain
The query posed by the user is parsed and executed using SPARQL. Since the do-
main ontology is in RDF format, the general structure of the query is (<subject,
predicate, object>). We identify seven types of queries for the subject-predicate-
object (hence forth referred to as <s-p-o>) structure of our ontology; these are:
s (only subject); p (only predicate); o (only object); s-p (subject and predicate);
s-o (subject and object); p-o (predicate and object); s-p-o (subject, predicate
and object specified). The actual query is formulated by binding the value of
the referred concepts in the input sentence to the generic SPARQL query of one
of the above seven types to formulate the precise query and retrieve the answer.
For example, let the referred concepts be, say, “models, Canon cameras”, then
the answer extracted out from the ontology would be “A630”. Let the input sen-
tence be “Could you please give me a list of camcorders that have a rebate?”.
For this query {camcorders, rebate} are the referred concepts respectively and
form <s-o> of the query. The exact query fired is as shown below:
Select = (“?f”)
where m=GraphPattern([(“?a”,ds[prd1],ds[val1]), (“?b”,ds[prd2],“?f”),
(“?a”, “?c”, “?a”) , (“?b”, “?c” ,“?a”)])
result = sparqlGr.query (select, where) where val1= camcorders and
prd1= item name and prd2 = rebate.
In case the query generation does not fetch an answer then the system traverses
the RDF graph. Ontology traversal takes in concepts identified from the input
sentence and determines which part of the ontology these concepts satisfy. That is,
the concepts could be leaf nodes or some intermediate nodes in the ontology graph.
Once this is established, the traversal tries to determine the relationship (direct
or inherited) between the concepts identified in the graph structure. For example,
if a user wants to know “what is common between DXG 3MP Digital Camcorder
- DXG-301V and Apple iPod- 80 GB Video”, the query generation mechanism is
not going to give an answer as it cannot find out the commonality easily, whereas
an ontology traversal would give the answer “Both are on discount”.
3.5 A Detailed Example

We consider a Retail Management System for a retail outlet that has a number
of products; some promotion offers and that caters to various customer needs.
Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4 show a sample data set.
An example of the domain ontology follows:
ds:Item ds:item id ds:5
ds:5 ds:item name ds:Aiptek IS-DV2 Digital Camcorder.
ds:5 ds:item type ds:camcorder.
ds:Item ds:item id ds:3
ds:3 ds:item name ds:Canon Digital Camera - SD900.
ds:3 ds:item type ds:camera.
Table 1. Item Store
Item store ID Item ID Store ID Cost amt Discount

4 1 201 500 0
6 5 200 750 25
6 7 201 400 15
4 10 201 1150 30
5 12 200 2000 35
5 3 200 200 10
4 2 201 1600 25
Table 2. Item
Item I Item name Item type

1 Panasonic Mini DZ Camcorder Camcorder
2 DXG 3MP Digital Camcorder - DXG-301V Camcorder
3 Canon Digital Camera - SD900 Camera
5 Aiptek IS-DV2 Digital Camcorder Camcorder
7 Apple iPod- 80 GB Video iPod
1 Panasonic Mini DV Camcorder Camcorder
2 Panasonic 2.8” LCD Camcorder SDR-S150 Camcorder
Table 3. Store
Store ID Store name Store addr

200 Nicollete Mall A123 NYK
201 PoundLand Udyog Vihar
Table 4. Department
Department ID Dept desc

22 Electronics
23 Apparel
The table name and the primary key form the subject (Item and 1 are the
subjects), the fieldname forms the predicate whereas the values of the fields form
the object in the ontology file. Let us assume that a user asks the question, “Which
camcorders have more than 20% discount?”. The primary way to answer this
question would be query formation and firing one of the seven query templates.
In this example it is:
Select= (”? f”)
where.addPatterns([(”?a”,”?c”,”?a”),(”? a”,ds[prd],”?f”),
(”?b”,”?c”,”?a”),(”?b”,”?d”,”?e”),(”?b”,ds[prd2], ds[va l2]),
(”?e”,”?d”,”?e”),(”?e”,ds[prd1], ds[val1])])
result= self.sparqlGr.query(select,where)
This query when fired fetches the appropriate answer:
“The Camcorders are DXG 3MP Digital Camcorder - DXG-301V, Panasonic
Mini DV Camcorder, Aiptek IS-DV2 Digital Camcorder, Panasonic 2.8” LCD
Digital Camcorder with 3CCD Technology - Silver (SDR-S150)”
This answer is then shown to the user.
4 Integrating Virtual Worlds and Business Applications

In this section, we describe how virtual worlds and business applications may be
integrated. We use NATAS as an example interface. Virtual worlds and enter-
prise systems may also be integrated using any other similar interface. To the
best of our knowledge, the kind of integration does not currently exist in any
of the online virtual worlds. However, one related service available in Second
Life is Jnana [2], uses voluntary human experts to advice novices on a particular
domain. The expert’s knowledge is uploaded into an interactive question-answer
system. When a novice needs to decide about a particular product or service,
the system prompts him with questions based on the expert’s knowledge. A se-
ries of questions and answers ensues till the novice is able to make an informed
decision based on the expert’s advice.While Jnana is very stable though, mean-
ing that the user can usually find what he is looking for, this system has the
following drawbacks. Firstly, since the expert knowledge is voluntary, it may not
be available on all topics of interest to the novice or it may not be complete to
the extent required by the novice. Secondly, questions are asked by the expert
rather than the novice. So, the novice cannot control the conversation based on
what he wants to know as opposed to what the expert wants to tell him.
The NATAS engine, on the other hand, has knowledge about the domain it
is being queried on as defined by the domain ontology - the more detailed the
ontology, larger is the question set that NATAS can answer. Further, expert
comments or reviews may be included, if available. Since the conversation is
initiated by the customer, it can be specific to what the customer wants to
know, rather than what the system wants to tell the customer. Further, as the
interface is in natural language, the customer can phrase the question in his own
style rather than having to figure out if the question posed to him answers what
he wants to know.
4.1 Integration Mechanisms

Virtual worlds provide tools for building objects or allow graphical models to
be uploaded. Scripts or code may run on the models so that they may have a
behavior associated with them. For example, a door may be coded so that it
opens and closes, a car maybe coded so that it can be driven around. Depending
on the underlying architecture of the virtual world, scripts may be written in
standard languages like Python, Java or in specially created languages like the
Linden scripting language used in Second Life. We use this functionality to link
Second Life with NATAS in the context of a retail store.
The tasks associated with a business application for a retail store include pro-
viding information about products like price, features, discounts and availability,
completing transactions for purchase and shipping the product to a real-world
destination. Scripts on objects in the virtual world also reside and run on the
server. It is possible to script an object to connect to an external web service
via hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP). NATAS is available as service enabled
on a web server to which external applications can connect. Thus, NATAS can
easily be integrated with an object, in this case a virtual assistant, in a virtual
world. Note that Second Life is just one example world to which NATAS has
been linked. In principle, NATAS can be linked to any virtual world using similar
or other mechanisms.
We have designed a retail store in Second Life with objects like Cameras,
iPods, T-shirts to name a few that can be bought in-world. Further, we have
added a robotic sales assistant in the store to answer queries posed by customers
on the items in the store. Since the assistant is created using the building tools
of Second Life, it is a graphical object within Second Life and does not require
a human to be logged on. Thus, assistance is always available to customers who
may login across different time zones. Also, the assistant can be programmed so
that it moves around with the customer, if he/she so desires, or can stand in one
place, answering any questions that the customer might have. The integration of
Second Life and NATAS is shown diagrammatically in figure 1. When a user asks
a question to the assistant using text chat, the query is extracted and sent as an
HTTP request to a web server on which NATAS is running. NATAS connects
to the appropriate retail store application, processes the query and formulates
the answer. The answer is then sent back as an HTTP response to the virtual
world where it is displayed as chat from the virtual assistant. Multiple users can
query NATAS at the same time and it maintains context of each conversation.
Fig. 1. Broad architecture of Second Life integration with NATAS
(a) (b)
Fig. 2. Broad architecture of Second Life integration with NATAS
Figure 2 (a) and (b) show some screenshots of a possible interaction with
NATAS through the sales assistant (or chatbot). Since the querying is done via
HTTP transfers, the response comes within a few seconds so that the conversa-
tion takes place in real-time.
The interaction with a business system may also be used to create a cus-
tomized interaction for the user. For example, the look and feel of the retail store
may change depending on the profile of the customer. Certain products may be
highlighted and others made to disappear completely depending on what the
customer is interested in. This information may be extracted from the conver-
sation the user has with the business system. We will discuss this aspect in the
dynamic rendering section of this paper.
4.2 Carrying Out Real-World Transactions
The interactions through the virtual world can lead to carrying out concrete tasks
and transactions on the business application system, such as “buy a camera”.
Such a task or transaction can actually lead to generation of an invoice for the
customer and billing activities. An order form can be automatically filled and
pushed to the customer (either directly onto a window on the virtual world, or
via an offline mode such as an email) to confirm the order he or she has placed.
Once the order is reconfirmed and the payment mechanism (such as credit card)
is confirmed, the shipping of the product can occur. Thus interactions in the
virtual world can lead to actual real-world transactions.
4.3 Dynamic Rendering
Dynamic rendering can help a virtual space to change on the fly depending on

feedback from the user. There are different kinds of changes that can be triggered
in a virtual space. For example, external changes such as the entire architecture
of the building in the virtual space can be changed from say multi-storied to
a single floor. Internally, the space can be made to look different- the colors of
the walls, layout or presence of objects etc. can all be changed. The experience
inside the space can also be changed - for example the same set of objects can
be made to behave differently.
Dynamic rendering has a number of advantages. From the perspective of the
owner of the virtual space, the same piece of land can be used for multiple
purposes. For example, one can create a retail store that turns into an insurance
information centre, a bank or a space for holding virtual conferences. Thus,
dynamic rendering can be used to switch between different domains. Even within
a domain, dynamic rendering can be used to highlight items or information that
the user may be interested in.
From a virtual retail store perspective, for example, users visiting a retail
store will be looking for different things - a younger person could be interested
in a particular style of clothes or music, while an older person can be interested
in another style. Dynamic rendering could help the same store cater to the needs
of both customers by rendering it according to customers preference. This has a
two-way benefit since the customer sees only what he is interested in, and this
cuts down on the time required for him to decide what he wants to buy. The store
owner, on the other hand, has more and quicker sales, as a customer does not
waste time in identifying what he wants and is aided in quicker decision-making.
5 Role of Visual Semantics in Retail Stores
While natural language based interaction in retail stores provides a powerful

shopping paradigm, there are many articles, whose properties cannot be easily
articulated and are better illustrated with visual examples. Paintings and ethnic
garments are a few examples of such media-rich commodities. Even for many
articles of common use, it is often the visual appearance of the package that
the buyer tends to remember rather than the detailed product attributes. For
example, packages of grocery products, the design of DVD and book jackets
help to uniquely identify the products. Thus, there is a need to deal with the
semantics that is hidden in the visual appearance of the products and packages,
their color and texture, the distinctive product-marks. In this section, we describe
two examples that exploit visual semantics.
5.1 Shopping by Example

With ubiquity of high resolution cameras with mobile phones, it is easy to cap-
ture the image of an empty carton of a grocery item or the jacket of a DVD or
a book. This motivates example based shopping, where the shopper provides a
visual example to request the intended product [3].
The overall operation of the system is depicted in figure 3. The product
database of an on-line store includes a few image examples of the product pack-
ages from different perspectives. The shopper uses his mobile camera or a we-
bcam to take a snap of the product package, which is submitted over MMS /
the Internet. A search algorithm operates on the image database and retrieves
the closest matching image. The desired product is so identified and the product
details are shown to the buyer to make the final purchase decision. In a retail
store in a virtual world environment, the avatar of the buyer shares a snap taken
in the real world with a seller agent in the virtual store and requests the desired
product. In this application, we identify the desired product by the visual ap-
pearance of the distinctive product-mark. The low level image features, such as
color and texture are not suitable for this purpose. Difficulties also arise from
imperfections in the user supplied images, because of imperfect lighting condi-
tions, surface glare and improper alignment of the hand-held camera as well as
wrinkles and damages of the used packages.
PCA-SIFT [4] provides a robust way to compare the product-marks with key-
points derived from the images and can take care of many of the imperfections.
The key-points are sharp and distinctive corners in the visual pattern charac-
terizing the product-mark and can somewhat be compared with keywords in a
text segment. Each product image contains an arbitrary number of key-points.
Each keypoint is represented as a 128-dimensional vector. The similarity between
two key-points is measured by the cosine of the angle between the vectors. The
similarity between two images is computed as follows
1. Let K1 = k11 , k12 . . . k1m be the set of key-points in the query image Q and
K2 = k21 , k22 . . . k2n be the set of key-points in a product P
2. Let k = 0 (no. of matching key-points in K1 and K2 )
3. For each member k1i ∈ K1, do
a. Let si = 1 (the largest possible value)
b. For each member k2j ∈ K2, do
i. sij = similarity(k1i , k2j )
ii. if sij < si , then si = sij
c. If si > t (threshold), k = k + 1
k
4. Similarity(Q, P ) = |K1|
In summary, a key-point in the query image Q is said to match a key-point in
the image of a product P, if the similarity between them exceeds a threshold
Fig. 3. Shopping by example
(t). The similarity of the query Q and the product P is established in terms of
number of matching key-points and is normalized by dividing the number with
the cardinality of the key-point set in the query image.
The list of products to be shown as the candidate solutions are computed as
follows
The products are ranked in the decreasing order of similarity. Let si be the
similarity value of the i-th product in the ranked list.
If sj > λ∗sj+1 (where λ is an arbitrary number), then j is treated as the cut-
off point in the list, i.e. the buyer is shown the products till (and including)
the j-th product from the top of the list.
If s1 > λ ∗ s2, only the first result is shown and the product is said to have
been identified uniquely.
If j > k (when k is a pre-decided constant), we conclude that the system
has failed to identify the product, either because the product has not been
in the database, or because extreme aberrations in the query image.
PCA-SIFT has the ability to distinguish key-points with great accuracy, and in
most of the cases, the algorithm produces a unique and correct result. Figure
4 depicts some such query image examples. It may be noted that the images
are distorted, have surface glare and out of focus. The system performs well
despite these defects in the input images, which are expected in a real application
scenario. Since there is a unique correct result for every query image, we use
Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) as a performance measure of the system. With
a database of more than 1000 products, the MRR of the system is found to be
97%.
Shopping by Example has an interesting application in the context of virtual
worlds. Suppose while navigating through a virtual environment, a user comes
across a real-world or virtual item of interest, for example, a new CD at a friends
house. The user may click an image of the item and store it on his hard-disk.
Many virtual worlds allow the user to click photos “in-world” using their client
software. Even otherwise, a user can use the print-screen facility to take an image
of what is being displayed on the screen. This image can be submitted as a query
to the SBE system to get more information about the item. Figure 5 shows the
usage of the SBE system from Second Life.
Fig. 4. Example query images
Fig. 5. SBE in Second Life
6 Conclusion
A next-generation virtual world-based retail store is a distinct possibility in the
near future. Such a store can provide the potential retail customer with a variety
of mechanisms to interact and select the appropriate product suitable to his or
her requirements. Natural language based interactions with a chatbot combined
with visual image based search can lead to an easy shopping experience for
the customer. With the store dynamically changing its layout and offerings, the
customer can get a rich and enhanced shopping experience. The role of semantics
in such interactions is important to be addressed, and it is also important to have
a framework that delivers such an experience. We have described an innovative
syst
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StellarSim: A Plug-In Architecture for Scientific
Visualizations in Virtual Worlds
Amy Henckel and Cristina V. Lopes
University of California, Irvine, Irvine CA 92697, USA

{ahenckel,lopes}@uci.edu
Abstract. More and more researchers in a variety of fields are turning

to virtual worlds for 3D simulations and scientific modeling. The use of
virtual worlds in this manner offers many benefits. However, the criti-
cal task of creating 3D objects for a simulation model is still a manual
process, which can be time consuming. Our research concentrates on cre-
ating a process that allows for the automatic population of 3D objects
in virtual worlds for researchers.
This paper presents a plug-in architecture framework that allows the
automatic creation of 3D objects and externalizes the behaviors of the
objects. This plug-in architecture makes it possible to utilize the under-
lying framework of the virtual world platform for the display of arbitrary
data, in a straightforward manner. A prototype application was created
based off this framework, augmenting the 3D platform OpenSim.
Keywords: virtual environments, content creation, 3D objects, sim-

ulation, modeling, astronomical modeling, OpenSim.
1 Introduction
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has announced
its interest in modeling mission data from interplanetary probes [1] [2] and de-
veloping a Mars and moon virtual habit [1] in Second Life [3], a popular virtual
world. This agency has also announced its interest in importing data from the
International Space Station Mission and Mars Mission into Second Life [4] [5].
In the field of astronomy, there are additional research interests for the use of
virtual worlds. For example, Piet Hut, Institute for Advanced Study, discusses
the benefits of using virtual worlds for collaboration among astrophysicists. He
started the group Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) for
this purpose [6]. He discusses using virtual spaces as collaboration tools, allowing
users to see visual representations of other users (i.e., avatars), and allowing
communication through voice or text with other avatars in real time. He believes
this method of communication gives the user a sense of being in the same room
as other people, which assists with sharing ideas [6] [7].
In addition to these examples, there exists a large number of research inter-
ests in the field of astronomy for the utilization of virtual worlds in simulation
and modeling. Due to the tremendous amount of data for stellar bodies and

Plug-In Architecture for Virtual Worlds 107
their movements recorded from interplanetary probes and telescopes [8] [9], we
examined the process of creating 3D representations of data (3D objects) used
for simulations and modeling in virtual worlds. What we observed was an inflex-
ible and time consuming process. For example, the 3D objects themselves must
be manually created, and manually customized. Textures (i.e., images that can
overlay a 3D object) are appointed to the object. To order to assign a behav-
ior (i.e., controlled movement, change in appearance, etc.), a script defining the
movement of an object has to be created and added to the individual 3D object.
We then looked at existing simulation programs used by astrophysicists to
discover if they experienced similar problems, to the ones we observed.
We gathered information pertaining to the use of these programs though infor-
mal discussions and interviews from astrophysicists involved in the analysis and
planning stages of the mission life cycle, as these stages make use of simulation
programs.
The results show there are various programs employed for modeling astro-
nomical data. Each program either produces a simulation for one type of data,
or requires extensive programming to visualize multiple types of data. This is
due to the different behaviors of an object, various aspects of an observed object,
and multiple sources of input for an object. The results also revealed only a few
of the programs used allow for the addition or modification of a 3D object; these
processes involved are manual and time consuming. Many of the astrophysicists
we spoke to express the need to use more than one program for a task due to
these restrictions.
This paper presents StellarSim, a framework designed to address the weak-
nesses pointed out above. We show how attributes about a planet (size, texture,
name, shape etc.) and modules defining the behavior of a planet can be easily
imported into a virtual world. The end result produces simulations consisting
of 3D representations of these kinds of data. These representations, or 3D ob-
jects, are automatically created and displayed in the virtual world. Our focus
was to create a flexible framework for the importing of customized attributes
and behaviors of an object into a rendering environment with minimal effort for
the user. We refer to this as the automatic population of 3D objects. Stellar-
Sim allows for an easy representation of multiple types of data by externalizing
the behaviors and attributes of these 3D objects, in particular when applied to
astronomy.
This paper focuses on StellarSim’s design. Future goals include receiving ad-
ditional iterative feedback on the design from end-users, adding further require-
ments and performing a thorough user study in situ. This paper describes some
of the motivations, findings, challenges, and future goals.
2 Related Work
Since this framework utilizes virtual worlds in creating a simulation program

for astrophysicists, this section will first discuss current 3D simulation programs
used in this field, then discuss current research with modeling in virtual worlds.
108 A. Henckel and C.V. Lopes
2.1 3D Programs in Use

The programs in use by this group of astrophysicists for 3D modeling and sim-
ulations are: Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA) [10], Satellite Orbit Analysis
Program (SOAP) [11], Java Mission-planning and Analysis for Remote Sensing
(JMARS) [12], Solar System Simulator [13], Visualization ToolKit (VTK) [14],
and Satellite Tool Kit (STK) [15]. As well, some users have built custom simu-
lation programs for particular missions due to one or more missing requirements
from available programs.
SOAP and SOA are only available to NASA, JPL, Aerospace Corporation,
and affiliates. SOAP is used to assist in projecting and analyzing satellite or-
bits, including positions and availability of sensors and communication links. It
utilizes the Spacecraft, Planet, Instrument, Camera-matrix, and Events toolkit
(SPICE) [16] [17], which is produced by NASA. SOA is used to find an ideal
time for an observation on a mission. The user can select a specific point in space
in which to ”view” the surroundings.
JMARS full edition is only available on particular missions. JMARS displays
images of 3D terrain and information from stellar instruments, such as maps and
image footprints. Solar System Simulator is a website that displays images of pro-
jected trajectories of orbiting objects from a defined point of reference and date.
STK and VTK are toolkits which are more flexible, and offer more options.
However, they require extensive programming for modeling use. VTK is a ren-
dering tool used to produce 3D images and plots, of any type of data. STK is
used to calculate position, orientation, view maps and images, check visibility of
a sensor, and project trajectories of satellites and probes.
Each program has its own advantages and disadvantages. Of the programs
listed, none allow for the automatic population of 3D objects from within. The
task of creating 3D objects in these programs is a manual process, if it is allowed.
Certain programs are restrictive on what an end-user can create. The programs
listed, except for STK and VTK, focus on modeling only one type of data. For
example, a program either focuses on the detailed terrain of a stellar body, or the
projected orbit of a stellar body, but not both. STK and VTK are both toolkits
and require extensive programming from the user for modeling.
Because of this, most of the users questioned utilize more than one simulation
program to accomplish a task. The majority of these users would prefer to utilize
one program, mainly to avoid duplicating work. Flexibility is an issue as well.
Most users expressed their requirements change from mission to mission. Because
of this, the users may switch from one group of programs to another depending
on the required tasks for planning a particular mission.
One additional observation was the inability for real-time collaboration with
these programs. All data files employed by these programs are stored on the
user’s PC, and cannot be easily shared or accessed by other users.
2.2 Virtual Worlds

There are many virtual world platforms in existence today and there is much
research on simulations and modeling in these virtual worlds. While it is beyond
the scope of this paper to discuss and compare the research in all virtual worlds,
this paper will discuss the research taking place in the most popular virtual
world platform used for simulation models, Second Life [3], and an open source
virtual world with similar user functionality, OpenSim [18].
NASA is involved in several projects within Second Life, and looks to virtual
worlds for assistance in future missions. Jessy Cowan-Sharp, who helped create
NASA’s CoLab island in Second Life [2] [19] [1] sees virtual worlds as a flexible
set of tools and useful for building scientifically accurate representations of data
from planetary probes. She mentions that collaboration with the members of
the virtual world community could add to their tests and sees the collaboration
capability of a virtual world as beneficial to this field.
Aside from the astrological simulations mentioned, Second Life is widely pop-
ular for creating simulation models for demonstrational, pedagogical, and an-
alytical purposes. Examples include a simulation modeling a Personal Rapid
Transit system [20], a demonstration showing how ants find food and leave a
pheromone trail [21], a heart murmur simulation [22], a hallucination simulation
[23], and a genetic model display [24].
The second virtual world platform discussed in this paper, OpenSim, is an
open source project, which employs Second Life’s client software to connect to
an OpenSim server. For the purpose of this feasibility study, OpenSim proved
to offer a more viable solution for our needs than Second Life. Both Second Life
and OpenSim were evaluated as a platform for this framework. Second Life had
some limitations which prevented our framework from being feasible. OpenSim
however produced a feasible and flexible solution.
There are additional open source virtual worlds, such as Sun Microsystem’s
Wonderland [25] and Darkstar [26], and Croquet [27]. Further studies would be
needed to develop and test the operability of the StellarSim framework with
such virtual worlds. With the continuous development of 3D virtual worlds,
we believe more and more opportunities will arise for further development of
simulation models.
3 Usage Scenario
StellarSim provides a method to input customized attributes and assign inde-

pendent behaviors to 3D objects, which accommodates for greater control over
customizing a simulation model on an ad hoc basis. Other modeling applications
can be created based off of this framework. This section describes three example
scenarios of how StellarSim can be employed.
Scenario 1 - Projected Path: Emma is required to calculate the projected path
of a shuttle and make adjustments to that path. She has to: (a) input data for
the shuttle, (b) increase and decrease the speed or orbit of the shuttle to discover
if the projected path will collide with other objects, (c) if the projected path will
place the shuttle in the right place on a specified date, and (d) if adjustments
are needed, modify the projected path accordingly.
Scenario 2 - Collaboration: After calculating the appropriate path of the shut-

tle, Emma now needs to: (a) share her calculations with a coworker and (b) both
will have to make adjustments to the simulation model, as appropriate.
Scenario 3 - Change Perspective: Jorge has received specifications on a new
mission involving a probe to Jupiter. He will need to (a) input data involving
the probe (b) monitor the projected path of the probe from Earth to Jupiter
then (c) monitor the projected orbit of the probe around Jupiter up close to see
if any other object, i.e., one of Jupiter’s moons, will interfere with the probe’s
lens and its predetermined target.
Details on the use of StellarSim for these three usage scenarios are described
in the Evaluation section.
Data Model. Current simulation programs are strongly coupled with the data
they represent; behaviors are not dynamically assigned to 3D objects. In order
to effectively create 3D models of multiple types of data, attributes (size, shape,
texture, etc) and behaviors (controlling factor of an object’s movement) of the
objects must be external to the main program. Figure 1 shows an illustration
of distinct types of objects that can have representation in StellarSim and their
structure within the virtual world platform.
Virtual World Platform

Attributes Attributes
Size, Behaviors Size, Behaviors
Planet Probe
Shape, Movement Shape, Movement
Texture Texture
Attributes
Size, Behaviors
Moon
Shape, Movement
Texture
Fig. 1. Representations of stellar objects within StellarSim
The design of StellarSim allows for the externalization of the attributes and
behaviors of the 3D objects through the use of configuration files and assem-
blies in Dynamic-link library (DLL) files. Once the attributes and behaviors are
defined, the object appears to behave as expected to the end-user.
Dynamics Modeling. Much research and progress have been made to better
understand and model our universe. The progress is remarkable, and beyond
the scope of this paper to fully address the outcome. There are many possible
methods for calculating planetary positions in the virtual world environment. For
this framework, algorithms simplified by Paul Schlyter [28], are used to calculate
the coordinates of the planets. To reference Paul Schlyter on the accuracy of his
algorithms, ”The accuracy of the computed positions is a fraction of an arc
minute for the sun and the inner planets, about one arc minute for the outer
planets.” [28]
This method was chosen for the initial design of the system for the reason that
it supports the externalization of the behaviors of objects. DLLs utilizing these
algorithms are assigned dynamically to the objects to calculate their positions.
4 Architecture and Implementation
The framework for StellarSim provides a plug-in architecture that applies an

object’s attributes and behaviors from external files. The object’s attributes and
behaviors are specified in configuration files and C# classes which are indepen-
dently compiled into DLL files. StellarSim loads those independently developed
components and executes them. This allows for the external data and behavior to
be instantiated in the generic virtual world. First it allows for greater flexibility
in modeling various types of objects. Second, it allows the systemic utilization
of the underlying virtual world platform across a variety of applications.
This architecture provides numerous benefits for an application design within
virtual worlds. The benefits of using OpenSim for our framework include a direct
access to the backend of the virtual world server for dynamic additions and
modifications of 3D objects, use of the system timer for orbit simulations, and
registration of events (discussed in more detail later in this section).
The plug-in architecture was implemented using OpenSim Region modules.
Region modules are collections of classes that implement the interface IRegion-
Module (DLLs themselves). There are many Region modules standard with
OpenSim. A new Region module, OpenSim.Region.StellarSim (StellarSim mod-
ule), was created for this application.
The StellarSim module reads in attributes for new objects and loads the ap-
propriate behavior modules designed to calculate the object’s position. It then
calls on these behavior modules and uses an existing module in OpenSim, Open-
Sim.Region.Environment (Environment module), to create the 3D objects and
update their positions in the virtual world. The StellarSim module also hosts web
services used for a web form interface for our prototype application. It listens
for http requests and executes appropriate functions for these requests. Figure
2 shows the architecture of the StellarSim framework.
The interface IRegionModule, listed below, requires that the functions listed
within it are included in all classes which implement this interface. During the
initialization of the OpenSim server, the working directory of OpenSim (open-
sim/bin) and the scriptengines directory (opensim/ScriptEngines) are scanned
for DLL files containing classes which implement IRegionModule. Once an ap-
propriate DLL file is located, OpenSim loads this file and executes the Initialise
and PostInitialise functions within it. After Region modules are loaded into the
OpenSim server, they remain active until the server is shutdown. Region mod-
ules are flexible in nature, and can perform a variety of tasks, including creating
Files used to specify attributes and behaviors of 3D objects

Configuration file (.ini) Behavior module (.dll)
Purpose: To specify the Purpose: Contains behavior

attributes of an object and classes for objects specified
its behavior class name. in a configuration file
Format: Comma delimited Language: C#
OpenSim Server consists of various interlinked modules)

OpenSim.Region.Environment
StellarSim Region module module
Purpose:
Reads in and parses attributes for each Purpose: Used to create and modify
object. 3D objects in OpenSim.
Loads the specified behavior class for each
object. Language: C#
Creates the html page for the web form
interface and listens for commands.
Contains functions to handle new positions,
orbit changes, simulation instance changes.
Calls on functions in the Environment
module to create and modify the 3D object.
Language: C#
OpenSim
OpenSim Client used to view 3D objects and adjust the simulation)

3D object
Web Form Interface
Purpose: To represent
Purpose: Allows the the attributes and
user to control aspects 3D object behaviors specified.
of the simulation.
Purpose: To represent Platform: OpenSim
Language: html the attributes and
behaviors specified.
Platform: OpenSim
Fig. 2. Diagram of the architecture of StellarSim

objects, modifying objects (such as updating the positions of objects), using the
system clock timer and registering for events (i.e., listening to chat messages,
user logins, http requests, texture transfers, etc.). Registration for events allows
an action to occur within the registered module in response to an event.
IRegionModule interface
public interface IRegionModule {
void Initialise(Scene scene, IConfig config);
void PostInitialise();
void Close();
string Name { get; }
bool IsSharedModule { get; }
}
The StellarSim module includes a new interface, IAstronomicalModule. IAstro-
nomicalModule is designed to be implemented by external behavior modules for
specifying the position of a 3D object. The StellarSim module reads in attributes
from comma delimited text files with the extension of .ini (configuration files).
These files reside under the StellarSim main directory (opensim/bin/StellarSim).
For each object listed in a configuration file, a class name must be provided. This
referenced class must implement the IAstronomicalModule interface and exist in
a DLL file under the StellarSim lib directory (opensim/bin/StellarSim/lib). The
StellarSim module loads the specified class and associates it with the object’s
attributes from the configuration file. It then uses the Environment module to
create a 3D object based on the provided information. Once the 3D objects are
created, they can be viewed via logging into the virtual world.
Listed below is the format of the configuration file, and the IAstronomi-
calModule interface. Examples using these files are shown in the Evaluation
section.
Format of the configuration file, *.ini
ObjectName, ClassName, Size.x, Size.y, Size.z, Shape, Texture
The IAstronomicalModule interface implemented by classes defining movement

of a 3D object
using System;
using OpenMetaverse;
namespace OpenSim.Region.StellarSim.Interfaces {
public interface IAstronomicalModule {
Vector3 PositionFromDate(DateTime date);
}
}
By using C# interfaces in this manner, certain functionality is then guaranteed
to exist in loaded modules. For example, the IAstronomicalModule interface
requires that the function ’Vector3 PositionFromDate(DateTime date)’ exists in
an object’s behavior module. This ensures that the StellarSim module can call on
a function PositionFromDate from a specified class, give it a date (in DateTime
format), and receive a position vector (in Vector3 format).
After the position vector is received, the StellarSim module scales the infor-
mation appropriately to fit within the simulation region limits. It then calls on
the Environment module to update the position of the 3D object.
The orbit of a 3D object in the virtual world is controlled here by continuously
updating that object’s position. The OpenSim system timer is used; the object’s
position is recalculated and adjusted every second.
Next, the StellarSim module registers for http request events. After a request
is made through the web form interface, the StellarSim module will call on
appropriate functions within itself to respond to the request.
The end result is as such: the end-user can launch the web form interface of Stel-
larSim and control the objects in the simulation. Figure 3 shows StellarSim’s web
form interface through the virtual world client. (This interface can also be used
through a web browser.) For example, to view the objects on a particular date, a
user makes a request from the web form interface and the StellarSim module up-
dates the objects’ positions based on information from the behavior modules.
Using Region modules allowed for the dynamic additions of and modifications
to the 3D objects, use of the system timer for the orbit simulation, and the
registration of events. By using this approach, the creation and modification
time of each object is relatively small. This allows for a smooth simulated orbit.
The code for StellarSim is written in C# with 501 lines of code for the main
module (OpenSim.Region.StellarSim), 7 lines of code for the interface class (IAs-
tronomicalModule), and 735 lines of code for two example simulations (described
next).
5 Evaluation: StellarSim
This section first shows two example simulations implemented with StellarSim.
The first example simulation displays the planets in the solar system. The second
example simulation displays Jupiter and its moons. These two simulations are
created in the same region. When switching between simulations all 3D objects
of the previous simulation are deleted then all 3D objects of the new simulation
are created in the same space.
Next, this section discusses previously defined usage scenarios and their ap-
plication with these two example simulations.
5.1 Applications
Simulation 1 - Solar System: There are many 3D simulation programs that model
the planets in our solar system, as this is a necessity for planning a mission in
our solar system.
The Solar System simulation was implemented by adding a configuration file
and a DLL file. Shown below are sections of the configuration file and class library
files used to create the DLL file that will specify the attributes and behaviors,
respectively, of the 3D objects in this simulation.
SolarSystem.ini
Mercury,...,http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/pix/mer0muu2.jpg
Venus,...,http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/pix/ven0ajj2.jpg
Earth,...,http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/pix/ear0xuu2.jpg
Mars,...,http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/pix/mar0kuu2.jpg
Jupiter,...,http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/pix/jup0vss1.jpg
Saturn,...,http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/pix/sat0fds1.jpg
Uranus,...,http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/pix/ura0fss1.jpg
Neptune,...,http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/pix/nep0fds1.jpg
Sun,...,http://solarviews.com/raw/sun/suncyl1.jpg
Examples.SolarSystem:Behavior.cs
using System;
using OpenSim.Region.StellarSim.Interfaces;
namespace Examples.SolarSystem{
public class Earth : IAstronomicalModule{
#region IAstronomicalModule Members
Vector3 IAstronomicalModule.PositionFromDate(...){
Planet earth = new Planet();
int d = earth.convertTime(date);
Vector3 newPos = earth.CalculateEarthPosition(d);
return newPos;
}
#endregion
}
public class Sun : IAstronomicalModule{ ... }
...
public class Neptune : IAstronomicalModule{ ... }
}
Examples.SolarSystem: Planet.cs shows sections of the class ”Planet”, which was

used in Examples.SolarSystem:Behavior.cs, listed above. Combined, they return
a position in Vector3 format for any object they define when given a Julian date.
Examples.SolarSystem:Planet.cs
using System;
namespace Examples.SolarSystem{
public class Planet{
public Vector3 CalculateSunPosition(int d){
...
Vector3 sunPos = new Vector3((float)sunx,...);

return sunPos;
}
public Vector3 CalculateMercuryPosition(int d){
...
calculateXYZ(...);
Vector3 planetPos = new Vector3((float)xeclip,...);
return planetPos;
}
public Vector3 CalculateEarthPosition(int d){ ... }
...
public Vector3 CalculateNeptunePosition(int d){ ... }
public int convertTime(DateTime date){ ... }
}
}
Remark on Scale. To accurately display a model of our solar system to scale,

allowing the smallest planet Mercury the smallest representation possible in
OpenSim, 73 regions of virtual land in diameter are required for a full orbit
around the sun for the farthest planet, Neptune. For the sake of this example
simulation (and to view more than one planet in a screen shot), the distances
between the planets have been scaled down.
Simulation 2 - Jupiter and moons: To switch from a general view to a detailed
view, the web form interface is used. Figure 3 shows the web form interface and
3D objects in the Jupiter simulation. The moons shown are: Io, Europa, Callisto,
and Ganymede.
The Jupiter simulation was implemented in the same fashion as the Solar
System simulation, with a configuration file and a DLL file. Shown below are
sections of these files.
Jupiter.ini
Callisto,...,http://solarviews.com/raw/jup/callistocyl2.jpg
Europa,...,http://solarviews.com/raw/jup/europacyl2.jpg
Ganymede,...,http://solarviews.com/raw/jup/ganymedecyl2.jpg
Io,...,http://solarviews.com/raw/jup/iocyl2.jpg
Jupiter,...,http://solarviews.com/browse/jup/jupitercyl1.jpg
Examples.Jupiter:Behavior.cs
using System;
using OpenSim.Region.StellarSim.Interfaces;
namespace Examples.Jupiter{
public class Jupiter : IAstronomicalModule{
#region IAstronomicalModule Members
Vector3 IAstronomicalModule.PositionFromDate(...){
Planet Jupiter = new Planet();

int d = jupiter.convertTime(date);
Vector3 newPos = jupiter.CalculateJupiterPosition(d);
return newPos;
}
#endregion
}
public class Callisto : IAstronomicalModule{ ... }
...
}
Fig. 3. Image from the virtual world client showing Jupiter and its moons with Stel-
larSim. StellarSim’s web form interface is shown on the right
5.2 Usage Scenarios with StellarSim

Scenario 1 - Projected Path: (a) To input new data for a shuttle within the Solar
System simulation, Emma can create or modify a behavior module adding a class
which implements the interface IAstronomicalModule. Next, information on the
shuttle’s attributes and a reference for the new class is added to the configuration
file under OpenSim/bin/StellarSim for the Solar System simulation (SolarSys-
tem.ini). Then, by using the web form interface and selecting the instance ”Solar
System” Emma can now see the new shuttle along with the planets configured in
the simulation. (b) To increase and/or decrease the speed of the shuttle, Emma
will again use the web form interface and select ”Increase Orbit” or ”Decrease
Orbit” accordingly. She can then view the shuttle with respect to other objects
within the Solar System simulation to look for any potential collisions. (c) To
align objects in the simulation corresponding to a particular date, Emma can
use the web form interface and enter a date under ”Realign objects for a Date:”.
(d) If any adjustments are needed, Emma can modify the behavior module for
the shuttle then reselect the Solar System simulation and her new changes will
take effect immediately.
Scenario 2 - Collaboration: (a) Emma can share her simulation with anyone
who has access to log into the OpenSim server hosting the simulation. (b) Both
Emma and her coworker can modify the behavior module for the shuttle, reselect
the Solar System simulation and see their changes immediately.
Scenario 3 - Change Perspective: (a) Jorge can input new data about the probe
in the same manner as Emma in scenario 1. (b) By viewing the Solar System
simulation, and using functionality listed in scenario 1, Jorge can follow the
projected path of the probe to Jupiter. (c) To switch to a more detailed view of
Jupiter and its moons, Jorge can either add a new behavior module for the shuttle
to depict its movement in orbit around Jupiter or use the behavior module from
the Solar System simulation. Next he can modify the configuration file under
OpenSim/bin/StellarSim for the Jupiter simulation (Jupiter.ini), adding a line
for the shuttle’s attributes and referencing the desired behavior class name. By
using the web form interface and selecting the instance ”Jupiter and its Moons”
he can now see Jupiter in a more detailed view and monitor if one of Jupiter’s
moons will interfere with the probe’s objective.
5.3 User Feedback

Our prototype application was shown informally to several astrophysicists from
our user group and a couple of suggestions came up after.
The first suggestion was to add the ability for the user to obtain a set of
real rectangular coordinate points, for any point on the screen. Currently the
rectangular coordinates shown through the virtual world client refer to a location
within an area in the virtual world and not the rectangular coordinates that
correspond to a location within the space being simulated.
The second suggestion was to add SPICE [17] toolkit to the backend of the
StellarSim framework. Currently its use is implemented with the programs SOA
and SOAP. Implementing this within StellarSim is feasible and discussed in the
next section.
6 Conclusions and Future Work

Virtual worlds are being used in research for simulations and modeling more and
more. The advantages of these virtual worlds make them attractive for modeling
and simulations.
In view of the increasing interest from the field of astronomy to utilize virtual
worlds in simulations and modeling, and the large amounts of data typically
involved with this field, we looked at the process of creating 3D objects in virtual
worlds. We found this process to be arduous.
We then looked to the existing simulation and modeling programs used by
astrophysicists to see if a more automated process existed there.
Not only did we find a similar problem among current simulation programs,
but we also discovered these programs had further limitations including the
lack of structure to enable collaboration with others. This particular problem is
remedied through the use of a virtual world; other issues are addressed through
the use of StellarSim.
The framework of StellarSim was designed to be flexible in nature, utilizing
the plug-in modular structure of OpenSim. It allows for the automated process
of 3D object population and ad hoc modifications to the 3D objects. By exter-
nalizing the attributes and behaviors of 3D objects, this framework generates an
application independent of the type of data being modeled which in turn makes
the application usable for more than one type of data.
The application, StellarSim, was designed for the use of astrophysicists during
the analysis and planning stages. It is currently a prototype and online connected
to UCIGrid.
Future versions of StellarSim can implement additional functionality features.
Features such as obtaining real rectangular coordinate points and adding the
use of SPICE in the backend of the framework. Implementing the SPICE toolkit
would allow for the use of SPICE available functionality within StellarSim which
includes the use of SPICE-hosted ephemeredes (tables of values that provide
positions of astronomical objects at a given time) in determining the movements
of 3D objects. This functionality would allow for a greater accurancy in computed
positions of planets, moons, probes, satellites, etc.
Our framework presented here can be extended to other fields, and the proto-
type application for StellarSim can be modified to incorporate additional func-
tionality. This approach utilizes an open source virtual platform to produce real-
time 3D models of planetary objects. This framework provides instant shared
access to a 3D simulation created in real-time and facilitating collaborative tools
that enable scientists to review and discuss these simulations.
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Formalizing and Promoting Collaboration in 3D Virtual
Environments – A Blueprint for the Creation of Group
Interaction Patterns
Andreas Schmeil1,∗ and Martin J. Eppler2

1
Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Lugano (USI),
Via Buffi 13, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland
andreas.schmeil@usi.ch
2
mcm – Institute for Media and Communications Management, University of St. Gallen,
Blumenbergplatz 9, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland
martin.eppler@unisg.ch
Abstract. Despite the fact that virtual worlds and other types of multi-user 3D
collaboration spaces have long been subjects of research and of application ex-
periences, it still remains unclear how to best benefit from meeting with col-
leagues and peers in a virtual environment with the aim of working together.
Making use of the potential of virtual embodiment, i.e. being immersed in a
space as a personal avatar, allows for innovative new forms of collaboration. In
this paper, we present a framework that serves as a systematic formalization of
collaboration elements in virtual environments. The framework is based on the
semiotic distinctions among pragmatic, semantic and syntactic perspectives. It
serves as a blueprint to guide users in designing, implementing, and executing
virtual collaboration patterns tailored to their needs. We present two team and
two community collaboration pattern examples as a result of the application of
the framework: Virtual Meeting, Virtual Design Studio, Spatial Group Configu-
ration, and Virtual Knowledge Fair. In conclusion, we also point out future re-
search directions for this emerging domain.
Keywords: group interaction, patterns, embodied collaboration, presence, vir-

tual worlds, MUVE, CSCW, blueprint, framework.
1 Introduxction
An ideal online, three-dimensional virtual environment would provide a space in
which users can move freely, interact intuitively with all kinds of objects, recognize
familiar people, and communicate in a natural manner with them – all in the most
realistic look-and-feel setting, evoking a feeling of being part of the virtual world. In
addition to that, it would allow displaying complex content or data in innovative and
useful ways, neglecting the limitations imposed by physical reality. Such an environ-
ment holds the promise of moving remote collaboration and learning to another level
of quality. But even if such platforms were available today (and they soon will be):
without the right kind of dramaturgy, script or setup, users would not know how to
best benefit from their infrastructure.
∗
Corresponding author.
122 A. Schmeil and M.J. Eppler
We believe that today’s available online virtual environments are already capable
of adding significant value to collaborative work and collaborative learning. How-
ever, companies, institutions as well as educators may not know how to utilize the
spatial characteristics of these environments to the fullest. Moreover, many of the
virtual environments that are currently (early 2009) being advertised as offering great
productivity boosts for collaborative work emphasize on the collaborative editing of
text documents, spreadsheets and presentation slides that are mounted on big walls – a
method of working together that would work just as well (or better) without gathering
in a three-dimensional virtual space.
Our premise, consequently, is that the main two features of 3D virtual environ-
ments, namely being embodied in an immersive environment, and the environment
being configurable at will, allow for new, innovative, and valuable forms of working
and learning together. With our research we aim at improving collaboration in these
virtual environments or virtual worlds following these steps:
• systemizing and formalizing the necessary elements for visual collaboration
• developing and identifying novel and existing collaboration patterns, and de-
scribing them in the developed formalism
• evaluating their effectiveness experimentally and comparing them (in terms
of added value) to other collaboration arrangements
In this paper, we focus on steps one and two and present a framework for embodied
collaboration in online 3D virtual environments, based on semiotics theory, as well as
an overview on virtual collaboration patterns. Our framework represents a blueprint
of how collaborative group interaction patterns in virtual environments can be de-
scribed or generated. We also present four examples of the application of the frame-
work, resulting in four online collaboration patterns. We believe this framework to
form a first important step in the process of formalizing collaboration in virtual envi-
ronments – a task that is crucial in order to put forward the application of 3D virtual
environments for serious and productive uses.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: First, we define online virtual
environments and present their advantages for collaboration. In section 3, we then
present a blueprint to formalize the design elements and necessary infrastructure of
collaboration patterns in such environments. In section 4, we provide real usage ex-
amples of collaboration patterns based on virtual embodiment. In section 5 we high-
light future research avenues for this domain. We conclude the article with a review
of our main contribution and its limitations.
2 Online Multi-user Virtual Environments

Virtual environments in general attempt to provide an environment where the user or
spectator feels fully immersed and present. This presence is a psychological phe-
nomenon that has been defined as the sense of being there in an environment. Immer-
sion, on the other hand, describes the technology of the virtual environment and its
user interface that aims to lead to the sense of presence. It can be achieved to varying
degrees, stimulating a variable number of human senses. However, the expression of
feeling immersed is often also used for online, desktop-based, virtual environments
that are controlled only by keyboard and mouse and address only two sensory chan-
nels: the visual and auditory one.
Formalizing and Promoting Collaboration in 3D Virtual Environments 123
This kind of virtual environment, featuring multiple users to be in the same shared
virtual space at the same time, has been named Online 3D Multi-User Virtual Envi-
ronment, or MUVE for short. While formal definitions are generally rare in this area,
a MUVE is agreed to be a special type of a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE).
In the ongoing scientific discourse in the research community, a Virtual World,
commonly understood as a special type of MUVE, has recently been defined as “a
synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by net-
worked computers” [2]. Our research only regards MUVE and Virtual Worlds as
opposed to locally installed multi-user VR systems, for the following two reasons:
First, the major benefit of utilizing 3D virtual environments is widely believed to be
the possibility to have instant team or group meetings without travel. Second, serious
collaboration in and between companies is not likely to take place in Immersive Vir-
tual Reality centers (due to availability, accessibility, costs, complexity, and constant
need for technical staff).
To date, there is an abundance of MUVE and Virtual Worlds available, for all age
groups and for many different areas of interest. The Virtual Worlds consultancy K
Zero keeps informative graphs up-to-date on their company website1. While systems
like Second Life, OpenSim and Activeworlds enable users to design their worlds and
to create static and interactive content themselves, others like Sun’s Wonderland and
Qwaq Forums focus on productivity in conventional tasks like the editing of text
documents, spreadsheets and presentation slides; only up-/download of documents
and repositioning of furniture is possible in these latter worlds. Still others focus on
providing training scenarios. New MUVE and Virtual Worlds are launched almost
monthly, and it seems like each new one tries to fill another niche.
Nevertheless, for most application domains, it is still unclear what value MUVE
might add to the existing modes of communication and collaboration, just as it re-
mains unclear which features and enhancements are needed to maximize the benefit
of using virtual worlds [1]. In a previous paper, we have discussed the advantages
(and potential risks) that collaborative virtual worlds bring for knowledge work and
education – which are by definition also valid for MUVE [17]. In this paper, we try to
define more specifically how these advantages can come about.
3 A Blueprint for the Creation of Collaboration Patterns

As already stated as our premise, we believe that the fact of being embodied in a
configurable three-dimensional virtual environment allows for innovative, valuable
new forms of working and learning (and also playing) together. Embodiment terms
the coalescence of recent trends that have emerged in the area of Human-Computer
Interaction (HCI) and reflects both a physical presence in the environment and a
social embedding in a web of practices and purposes [7]. It is in the same manner
applicable to group interaction in MUVE, as users feel immersed in the virtual envi-
ronment and present in the same setting with their colleagues or peers (co-presence).
With configurable we mean the possibility of creating or uploading and editing or
modifying interactive objects in the virtual environment.
1
http://www.kzero.co.uk [last access 11/02/2009]
While there has been research on the feasibility and usability of embodied conver-
sational agents in Virtual Reality (VR) applications [15], and also on presence and co-
presence in VR [19], it is yet to be investigated how embodiment in online virtual
environments affects group interaction and collaborative tasks. Manninen states that
“the successful application of a social theory framework as a tool to analyze interac-
tion indicates the importance of joining the research effort of various disciplines in
order to achieve better results in the area of networked virtual environment interac-
tions.” [12]. His work and results will be discussed in more detail in subsection 3.3.
The approach we are presenting in this paper is also of interdisciplinary nature – in
particular, we combine communication theory and insights from the field of HCI. The
resulting framework presents a systematic view on the field of Multi-User Virtual
Environments (MUVE) and their utilization for collaborative tasks. As such it repre-
sents a blueprint on which diverse collaboration tasks, such as planning, evaluation,
decision making or debriefing can be designed and executed. It is based on the under-
lying distinctions of semiotics and employs concepts from the HCI research field. We
present it in detail and discuss its use in 3.5. In the following, we first describe the
various steps that we have taken in developing the framework.
3.1 Using Patterns for the Description of Virtual Embodied Collaboration
We have realized the need for a solid formal framework that is capable of describing
collaboration in MUVE in all its aspects while identifying group interaction patterns
of collaborative work and learning in the virtual world Second Life [17]. The pattern
approach is a useful and concise approach to classify and describe different forms of
online collaboration. Manninen states that the utilization of real-world social patterns
as basis for virtual environment interactions might result in usable and acceptable
solutions [12].
An alternative approach to using patterns would be to describe collaborative situa-
tions as scenarios. A scenario is an “informal narrative description” [6]. However,
comparing this with the definition of patterns, a “description of a solution to a specific
type of problem” [9], reveals that the pattern concept has been contrived with more
focus to solve a problem or to reach a goal. In addition to that, a look at the work of
Smith and Willans, who implement the concept of scenarios for requirements analysis
of virtual objects [21], makes it clear that the scenario-based approach is too fine-
grained and at a too low, functional level to describe whole collaborative tasks in
flexible multi-user settings.
Hence, we have decided to use the pattern approach. We adapt the collaboration
pattern definition from [9] by adding the notions of tools and a shared meeting loca-
tion, to give us the following definition: A collaboration pattern is a set of tools, tech-
niques, behaviors, and activities for people who meet at a place to work on a common
goal, together in a group or community. How exactly this definition fits with the
resulting framework will be explained by means of an illustration in 3.5.
3.2 The Semiotic Triad as an Organizing Structure
From a theoretical point of view, one can conceive of collaboration activities as inter-
pretive actions and of collaboration spaces as sign systems in need of joint interpreta-
tion. Visual on-screen events in virtual spaces have to be interpreted by users of
MUVE as relevant, meaningful, context-dependent signs that contribute towards joint

sense-making and purposeful co-ordination. As in any sign interpretation system or
(visual) language, semiotic theory informs us that three different levels can be fruit-
fully distinguished, namely the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic ones [8]. This three-
fold distinction has already been applied effectively to various forms of information
systems or social online media (e.g. [18]). These three distinct interpretive layers can
be applied as follows to immersive virtual worlds:
The syntactic dimension contains the main visible components of a collaboration
pattern and its configuration possibilities. The syntactic dimension ensures the visibil-
ity and readability of a collaboration pattern. It provides the necessary elements as
well mechanisms to use elements (digital artifacts and actions) in combination.
The semantic dimension refers to the acquired meaning of elements and to the
conventions used in a collaboration pattern. It outlines which operations or artifacts
assume which kind of meaning within a collaboration pattern. While the syntactic
dimension tells the user how to use a collaboration pattern (and with which elements
or actions), the semantic dimension aligns the available visual vocabulary to the de-
sired objectives or contexts. In this sense the semantic level is a liaison layer between
the virtual world and the participants’ objectives.
The pragmatic dimension reflects the social context of the participants, and their
practices, goals and expectations. It is these intentions that need to be supported
through the dramaturgy (semantic dimension) and the infrastructure (syntactic dimen-
sion). This dimension clarifies in which situations which type of dramaturgy and
infrastructure use makes sense.
3.3 Action and Interaction in 3D Virtual Environments
In our understanding, the support of action and interaction forms one major part of a
virtual environment’s infrastructure. It determines how users can act and affects their
behavior in both lonely jaunts and in group settings. Moreover, the way users can
control their avatars and perform actions heavily influences the level of satisfaction of
the user and thus in the end determines whether or not collaborative work or other
planned tasks in the virtual environment succeed or fail, continue or are abandoned.
We believe that a formalization of action and interaction in virtual environments on
a high abstraction level is required. Manninen successfully applied a social theory
framework to create a taxonomy of interaction, resulting in a classification of eight
categories: Language-based Communication, Control & Coordination, Object-based
Interactions, World Modifications, Autonomous Interactions, Gestures, Avatar Ap-
pearance, and Physical Contacts [12]. However, this classification is based on studies
in multi-player online action and role-playing games, where different requirements
regarding interaction must be assumed than for serious collaborative tasks. Also, the
study might have focused too much on a language-centered perspective and neglected
some of the genuinely visual aspects of virtual worlds.
In the field of Human Computer Interaction there is a generally accepted distinc-
tion among navigation and manipulation techniques. Navigation techniques comprise
moving the position and changing the view. Manipulation techniques designate all
interaction methods that select and manipulate objects in a virtual space. In some
cases, the side category System Control is used, consisting of all actions that serve to
change a mode and modify parameters, as well as other functions that alter the virtual
experience itself. Bowman and colleagues refine this classification by adding a cate-
gory Symbolic Input for the communication of symbolic information (text, numbers,
and other symbols) to the system [5]. For our purpose of formalizing (inter)actions for
collaboration, we build on this classification and make the following adjustments to
align it with the requirements of the area of Online 3D MUVE:
The importance of communicating text, numbers, symbols, and nowadays also
speech to the system (and thus to other avatars or users, interactive objects, or the
environment itself) has increased significantly. We call this first category Communi-
cative Actions. A sub-division differentiates between verbal (i.e., chatting) and non-
verbal communication (i.e., waving).
Having both navigation techniques and methods for changing the view in one
shared category, results from the fact that HCI and VR systems do not necessarily
assume the existence of an avatar as a personalization device in the virtual environ-
ment; without this embodiment, navigating and changing the viewpoint can be con-
sidered as one and the same action. In our classification, changing one’s view would
fall into the communicative actions category, as a non-verbal form of letting others
know where the user’s current focus of attention is, or to communicate a point or
object of interest to others in the virtual environment (the primary purpose of
changing the view can be disregarded here, since it is only the actuating person who
experiences the change). As a result, our second category, Navigation, comprises only
walking, flying or swimming, and teleporting (in the nomenclature of Second Life).
We rename the manipulation techniques category as Object-related Actions. Ac-
tions referring to the creation or insertion of virtual objects also belong to this cate-
gory, along with selection and modification techniques. By insertion we mean the
result of uploading or purchasing virtual objects, for instance.
All system control actions are much less important in MUVE than they are in clas-
sic Virtual Reality systems. Due to the often customized or prototype forms of VR
applications, system control is in many cases developed and tailored to only one ap-
plication. In MUVE, by contrast, the viewer software (i.e. the client application to
enter the virtual environment) is usually standardized and provides a predefined set of
system control options. Hence, we dispense with a system control category.
If one were to put these actions on a continuous spectrum, they could also be dis-
tinguished in terms of their virtual world effects or level of invasiveness or (space)
intrusion. Chatting or changing one’s position, avatar appearance, or point of view is
far less intruding than moving an object, triggering a rocket, or blocking a door.
Further, it has to be noted that these distinctions and the resulting classification do
not include virtual objects. These, in our view, require a separate classification that
takes their manifold types and functions into account. In the following subsection, we
discuss this important element of virtual environments.
3.4 A Typology of Objects in Virtual Environments
In his successful book The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman postulates
that people’s actions and human behavior in general profits from everyday objects
being designed as to provide affordances, i.e., they should communicate how they
should be used [13]. He argues that less knowledge in the head is required (to perform
well) when there is, what he calls, knowledge in the world. This insight can be fruit-
fully applied to virtual worlds by building on latent knowledge that users have and by
providing cues that reuse appropriate representations [20]. This not only gives moti-
vation for practitioners to utilize virtual environments for collaborative tasks, but
implies that objects in virtual environments and their design are of great importance.
Hence, we understand virtual objects as to form another major part of a virtual envi-
ronment’s infrastructure. Affordances can (and should) be used to signal users how to
interact with a particular object, or how objects with built-in behaviors may act with-
out any direct influence from the user’s side.
Fact is, however, that for a long time researchers active in virtual environments
have focused largely on graphical representation and rendering issues. With the
launch (and most of all with the hype) of Second Life, a new era of accessible online
virtual environments has begun. Following the trend of enabling users to create con-
tent (also a vital element of Web 2.0), users of many MUVE can now create and edit
objects, and customize the appearance of their avatars. With the possibility of script-
ing objects, they have become a powerful instrument in designing memorable user
experiences in MUVE. In fact, interactive virtual objects represent technology in
virtual environments; without active and interactive objects, any virtual environment
would be nothing more than a virtual version of a world without technology. This
comparison might illustrate the need for a formalization regarding virtual objects.
In spite of their crucial functional importance, little research has been conducted on
classifying virtual objects so far. More work has been done on the technical side; for
instance, an approach of including detailed solutions for all possible interactions with
an object into its definition has been proposed [11]. Another later presented frame-
work takes up on this idea and adds inter-object interaction definitions [10]. Currently
– to the authors’ knowledge – at least the two MUVEs Second Life and OpenSim
support defining avatar positions for interaction within an object definition, as well as
inter-object communication. A first informal classification of virtual objects was pro-
posed by Smith and Willans while investigating the requirements of virtual objects in
relation to interaction needs: the authors state that the task requirements of the user
define the behavioral requirements of any object. Consequently, they distinguish
between background objects, which are not critical to the scenario, contextual objects,
being part of the scenario but not in the focus, and task objects, which are central to
the scenario and the actions of the user [21]. While this distinction may be useful for
determining the level of importance of virtual objects, i.e. in requirements analysis
phase, it does not distinguish objects based on their functional characteristics. Hence,
we present a classification of virtual objects according to their activeness and their
reaction to user actions:
Static Objects have one single state of existence; they do not follow any type of
behavior and do not particularly respond to any of a user’s actions. We distinguish
among static objects that are in a fixed position, i.e. not movable and not to take
away, and objects that are portable. These latter static objects can be visibly worn,
carried or just repositioned, and thus have a distinct value for visual collaboration.
Automated Objects either execute animations repeatedly or by being triggered. Al-
ternatively they follow a behavior (ranging from simple behaving schemes such as
e.g. following an avatar, through highly complex autonomous, intelligent behaviors).

We further separate the most rudimentary of all object behavior forms into an extra
sub-category – the behavior of merely constantly updating its state or contents.
Interactive Objects represent generally the notion of a tool or instrument; either
they produce an output as a response to a given input, or they execute actions on di-
rect user commands (like e.g. a remote control), or they act as vehicles, meaning that
the user directly controls their movement (with or without the user’s avatar on it),
using his primary navigation controls. The border between automated and interactive
objects may seem fuzzy at first, but it is clearly delineated by the differentiation
whether a user triggers an object to act deliberately or indirectly.
Considering alternative classification properties, for example the distinction of
whether virtual objects are fixed in their position or not, whether they can be moved
or deformed, or follow physical laws, e.g. move in the wind, is in our belief of secon-
dary importance – especially for the use cases we try to support with our contribution
(professional collaboration tasks).
3.5 A Blueprint for Embodied Virtual Collaboration
Figure 1 illustrates the framework for virtual collaboration based on the distinctions
described in the previous sections. It is intended as a blueprint for virtual, embodied
collaboration in virtual environments. As such, it can be used as a basis to develop or
describe collaboration patterns in MUVE. Its three-tier architecture reflects the syn-
tactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels of a collaboration medium, as discussed in 3.2.
In the following, we explain the parts of the framework, in a top-down order.
Context and Goal. The context describes the application domain of a collaboration
pattern, while the goal defines more specifically what kind of activity a pattern aims
to support. A first category comprises patterns that aim for collaborative work in the
traditional sense, i.e. having main goals such as to share information or knowledge,
collaboratively design or create a draft, a product, or a plan, assess or evaluate data or
options, or make decisions etc. Since these goals do not necessarily have to be associ-
ated with work in the narrow sense of the word, we label the first context category
Collaborate (for a definition of collaboration see [16]). The category Learn frames
the domain of education. We assigned six goals to it, selected according to Bloom’s
Taxonomy [3]. Bloom distinguishes different levels of learning goals starting with
simple memorizing or recalling information, to the more difficult tasks of compre-
hending something, being able to apply it, analyze it, being able to synthesize it or
even evaluate new knowledge regarding its limitations or risks. In the domain of Play
we do not strive for mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categories and
simply allude to such usual game oriented goals as feeling challenged by competition,
distracting oneself (losing oneself in a game), or socializing with others in a playful
manner. A collaboration pattern can also be aiming at several goals.
Dramaturgy. The term dramaturgy in this context designates the way in which the
infrastructure in virtual world is used to reach a specific collaboration goal or in other
words support a group task. While the goals and contexts specify the why of a
Fig. 1. A Blueprint for Embodied Virtual Collaboration
collaboration pattern, and the infrastructure (below) the how, the dramaturgy consists
of the necessary participants and their roles and relations (the ‘who’), their interaction
spaces and repertoire (the ‘where’), as well as the timing and sequencing of their
interactions (the ‘when’). The dramaturgy also specifies the actions (the ‘what’) taken
by the participants and the social norms and rules they should follow within a given
collaboration pattern. The dramaturgy defines in which ways the infrastructure of a
virtual world can be used by the participants to achieve a common goal.
Infrastructure. The final, most basic level of the blueprint contains the previously
discussed elements Actions and Objects. As explained in previous subsections, we
think it is useful (for the design of patterns) to distinguish among communicative,
navigational, and object-related actions and among static, automated, and interactive
virtual objects.
We refined a definition of a collaboration pattern in subsection 3.1, as being a set
of tools, techniques, behaviors, and activities for people who meet at a place to work
on a common goal, together in a group. Using the wording of the framework, this
would translate to a set of objects, actions, rules, and steps for participants with roles
who meet at a location to collaborate on a common goal in a given context. A specific
collaboration pattern is then an instance of the framework and can be defined using
the parameters positioned within the framework.
There are two distinct ways in which the above blueprint can be used for practi-
cal and research purposes: It can be used in a top-down manner from goal to infra-
structure in order to specify how a given goal can be achieved using an online 3D
virtual environment. Alternatively, the blueprint can be used bottom-up in order to
explore how the existing virtual world infrastructure can enable innovative drama-
turgies that help achieve a certain collaboration (or learning) goal. In the next sec-
tion, we are going to illustrate how the elements of the framework can help in the
description of collaboration patterns. Some of these patterns have been developed
using the framework in a top-down manner, while others were created from a bot-
tom-up perspective.
4 Examples of Collaboration Patterns Based on the Blueprint
The theory of patterns, originally developed for architecture [14], but in practice more
commonly used in software development, can be applied to the domains of collabora-
tion, as outlined above. The documentation of collaboration patterns, however, needs
to be adapted to the context of virtual environments. For this purpose, we have pre-
sented a collaboration framework in section 3 which we will now use to present a
series of online collaboration patterns.
We have collected a number of virtual collaboration patterns and formalized them
using the blueprint of section 3. The resulting patterns range from Virtual Team Meet-
ing, Virtual Town Hall Q&A, Virtual Design Studio, Online Scavenger Hunt, Virtual
Role Playing, Project Timeline Trail, Project Debriefing Path, Virtual Workplace,
Virtual Knowledge Fair, to Spatial Group Configuration (for these and other patterns,
see [17]). In figures 2 and 3, we provide four examples of collaboration patterns based
on our framework. The first two patterns support teams in their collaboration, while
the patterns documented in figure 3 can be used by larger groups. As the figures illus-
trate, a collaboration pattern (i.e. an instance of the framework) is comprised of one or
several alternatively applicable contexts, several possible goals for the pattern, a full
dramaturgy description, and avatar actions and virtual objects that are required.
Hereby, actions and objects are ordered by relevance for the particular pattern (e.g.
talk and chat can be useful for most patterns, although are not crucial in every case,
thus not documented there).
These four examples illustrate that the framework presented can be used to ana-
lyze or document the core requirements for online, virtual embodied collaboration
in the form of patterns (although a complete pattern description should also contain
pointers to related patterns). The framework cannot, however, predict the actual
value delivered by such collaboration patterns. We will address this important issue
in section 5.
Fig. 2. Two Collaboration Patterns for Virtual Teams in the Structure of the Blueprint
Fig. 3. Two Collaboration Patterns for Virtual Communities, in the same Structure
5 Future Research Needs and Initiatives
Having established a systematic map of the elements required to devise and

implement virtual, immersive and embodied collaboration patterns, the question nev-
ertheless remains which of these patterns are the most effective ones in terms of their
benefit in supporting collaboration tasks in groups (and what drawbacks or risks they
may contain). To this end, we are currently devising experimental settings in order to
compare virtual collaboration patterns with other collaboration settings. Our first
experiment will take place in an especially prepared project setting implemented in an
OpenSim environment. It will consist of a series of typical project management tasks,
such as introducing project team members to each other, team building, conducting a
stakeholder analysis, or agreeing on a joint timeline of project milestones. In a first set
of experiments we will use students as participants, in a second round managers.
In addition to observing and recording the behavior and measuring the perform-
ance of the participants, we will also administer ex-post surveys on the participants’
satisfaction with the task and communication support provided by the collaboration
pattern and the virtual environment. This should give us additional insights into how
the elements of a virtual collaboration pattern work together. While these experiments
will yield relatively reliable data, they nevertheless lack the real-life context in which
collaboration usually takes place. Consequently, a further area of research consists of
participatory observation (or alternatively online ethnographies) in real-life collabora-
tion settings that take place in virtual worlds. This will allow researchers to better
assess the real advantages and disadvantages of this new form of working together.
Additionally, in another related ongoing research project we are investigating com-
munication and the use of tools in real-life design studios [4]. This work might give
further insights on the infrastructural requirements (i.e. actions and objects, in our
blueprint nomenclature) for patterns for collaborative design.
6 Conclusion
In this contribution, we have developed and presented a systematic framework that

organizes the necessary elements for the design and implementation of collaboration
patterns in virtual worlds. This framework is based on three levels, namely the prag-
matic or contextual level, including the goals of an online interaction, the semantic or
dramaturgic level that defines how elements and actions are used (and interpreted) in
time to achieve the collaboration goal, and the syntactic or infrastructure level consist-
ing of the actual objects and online actions that are combined to implement a collabo-
ration dramaturgy. We have presented two team-based virtual collaboration patterns,
and two community-based collaboration patterns to illustrate the use of the framework.
In terms of limitations and future research needs, we have pointed out that our frame-
work does not provide indications as to the value added of collaboration patterns. This
is thus an area of future concern that we will examine through the use of controlled on-
line experiments and in-situ participatory observation within organizations.
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Conceptual Design Scheme for Virtual Characters
Gino Brunetti1 and Rocco Servidio2

1
INI-GraphicsNet Stiftung,
Rundeturmstrasse 10, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany
gino.brunetti@inigraphics.net
2
Linguistics Department, University of Calabria,
P. Bucci Cube 17/B, 87036 Arcavacata di Rende, Cosenza, Italy
servidio@unical.it
Abstract. The aim of this paper is to describe some theoretical considerations

about virtual character design. In recent years, many prototypes of cognitive
and behavioral architectures have been developed to simulate human behavior
in artificial agents. Analyzing recent studies, we assume that there exists a vari-
ety of computational models and methods in order to increase the cognitive
abilities of the virtual characters. In our opinion, it is necessary to perform a
synthesis of these approaches in order to improve the existing models and
avoiding the application of new approaches. Considering these aspects, in this
paper we describe a taxonomy that explores the principal cognitive and compu-
tational parameters involved in the design, development and evaluation of a vir-
tual character.
Keywords: Virtual characters, Emotions, Gestures, Artificial behavior, Cogni-

tive Modelling.
1 Introduction
It is well known that nonverbal communication like emotions, gestures and body
movements play an essential role in human communication. Consequently, we have
seen an increase in interest in the design and realization of software and hardware
systems able to simulate human abilities, e.g. for human-machine interaction such as
multimodal interaction, interactive models, virtual reality and 3D interaction [1]. The
high rate of evolution of virtual characters applications implies that it is necessary to
manage more efficiently the design and development of complex and dynamic behav-
ior. Much research [2] has shown that virtual characters’ expressions of empathic
emotions enhance users’ satisfaction, engagement, perception of the virtual agents,
and performance in task achievement [3, 4, 5].
In order to increase reliability, recent studies have proposed a new class of interpo-
lation algorithm for generating facial expressions to manage emotion intensity [6].
MPEG-4 is a standard for facial animation [7, 8, 9] which researchers use to specify
both archetypal facial expressions and facial expressions of intermediate emotions
[10]. Experiments were conducted to study individual differences in users’ percep-
tions of blended emotions from virtual characters expressions [11, 12]. Layered
136 G. Brunetti and R. Servidio
models were defined for relating facial expressions of emotions on the one hand, and,
on the other, moods and personality traits, using three different timescales [13]. All of
the studies show the existence of different computational models of emotions. Often,
the research describes the design and implementation of a complete new prototype,
mixing discussion of technical innovations with new application areas or approaches
and interaction techniques. In spite of the fact that most of these studies are generic,
there is no well-defined and commonly accepted approach regarding how the virtual
characters architecture should be designed. Moreover, experimental results show that
researchers have designed excellent models of virtual character behavior. Virtual
characters are not designed just for movies and games. They can be used for a variety
of purposes such as training, education, psychological therapy, etc. For example,
eLearning is one application field for virtual characters. They are used to present
educational material, answer users’ questions and give feedback about learning pro-
gression. In general, the virtual characters applications are a topic of interest for many
researchers. It is now necessary to identify specific guidelines in order to develop
virtual characters able to exhibit more complex behavior.
In this paper, we propose a taxonomy in order to identify the principal cognitive
functions involved in the design and evaluation of virtual characters. In many cases,
these models are not the result of flawed research, but the necessary negotiation made
in the exploration of new approaches that integrate different research areas. So, these
approaches allow the implementation of a good system, but the evaluation process is
different in comparison to another approach. We want to define the state of the art
involved in the design and implementation of virtual characters. We propose an
attempt at a taxonomy which describes the principal research for the modelling, reali-
zation and evaluation of virtual characters. The paper provides an account of the
following problems: 1) virtual character properties; 2) psychological aspects that
influence the perception of the virtual character’s actions; 3) definition of a virtual
character criteria set in order to design successful virtual characters.
The paper consists of seven sections. In the next section, we offer a description of
the relation between emotions and virtual characters. The artificial emotions recogni-
tion process is discussed in section 3. Gestural behavior is examined in section 4.
Section 5 describes the taxonomy for virtual character research. Finally, in section 6
we then offer some conclusions and seek to trace some future directions in virtual
characters design.
2 Emotions and Virtual Characters

“Emotion researchers define an emotion as a short-lived, biologically based partner of
perception, experience, physiology, and communication that occurs in response to
specific physical and social challenges and opportunities” [14]. The aim of this defini-
tion is to distinguish the emotions from other phenomena. In general, emotions are
evoked by flexible interpretations of stimuli and have specific intentional objects
while moods have less specific cause and remain for longer periods of time. For ex-
ample, emotion traits, such as hostility and shyness, respond emotionally to broad
classes of stimuli. Mood represents the overall view of an individual internal state.
Whereas the emotions are associated with a specific expression or cause, moods are
Conceptual Design Scheme for Virtual Characters 137
not identifiable in terms of cause. The difference between emotion and mood is that,
emotions regulate actions, while moods modulate the cognition.
Emotion researchers agree on the adaptive functions of emotions, but they propose
different explanations for this aspect. The ability to communicate emotions is essen-
tial for a natural interaction between human and virtual characters. If a virtual charac-
ter does not possess emotional expressions, it could be interpreted as indifferent to-
wards the human. Therefore, it is important that a virtual character show its emotional
state in order to improve the interaction with the user or with other virtual agents.
Specifically, the researcher proposes different approaches and methodologies to de-
sign artificial emotions. The aim of this research is to implement, in virtual characters,
artificial emotions able to generate affective behavior improving autonomy, adapta-
tion, and social interaction in the virtual environment. Based on the functional role of
emotions, [15] specifies 12 potential roles for emotions in artificial systems. A survey
of relevant virtual character behavior is showed by [16].
The creation of virtual characters is an interdisciplinary research field. The disci-
plines involved include design and implementation of cognitive architecture [17],
modelling of a nonverbal communication system [18], expressiveness of the virtual
character to improve visual realism and to solicit a realistic response [19], and finally
to design user-friendly Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) [20]. Other aspects concern
behavioral analysis [21] and the realization of the virtual scenario where the virtual
characters are posted in [22]. Designing expressive virtual characters raises several
research questions [23]. From a computer science point of view, the characters should
be able to display facial expressions of complex emotions in real-time based on dif-
ferent user inputs, whilst, from a psychological point of view, designers of virtual
characters need to know the cognitive processes regarding user perception and which
are involved both in the facial recognition and in the movement expression.
In recent years, several virtual character cognitive architectures have been pro-
posed. The aim of these architectures is to reproduce realistic human abilities, with
the purpose of going beyond the display of individual basic emotions models, defined
for the facial display through so-called blends of emotion or nonarchetypal expres-
sions [12, 24, 25]. However, applied models and methods, even if derived from an
interdisciplinary approach, show some limits. Often the design and implementation of
virtual characters is based on specific application requirements or developed as a test
to verify a research hypothesis. Such approaches do not always reflect the goals of
this research area in terms of qualities of the results to achieve. However, the realiza-
tions of virtual characters that show human abilities is a highly complex task. De
facto, the research methods used are much discussed.
The major difficulty in this research field is the fact that believability of the virtual
characters is essential for an effective interaction. Believability is the ability of the
agent to be viewed as a living, although fictional, character. These studies can be
divided into two separate but interconnected approaches, which use empirical results
to design virtual characters. The first approach creates virtual characters without an
internal mental state. In this case, the emotions are the results of mathematical and
geometrical models that manage the visual movement of the virtual characters. Re-
search results of this approach are used to build character’s animations. The analyses
are based on the recognition of emotion by subjects [26, 27]. The second approach
designs and develops virtual characters to be included within immersive virtual
environments. The primary goal of this approach is to improve interaction and com-
munication between agents and users. In this case, the computational model of the
virtual characters includes a mental state of the personality in order to obtain a more
realistic behavior. The purpose of these studies is to measure the communication
between subject and virtual characters, such as interaction and collaboration. Com-
pared to the first approach, which simulates all basic emotions, the latter simulates
few emotional expressions, but the virtual characters are provided with body move-
ments in order to increase the complexity of the realized actions.
3 Modelling Artificial Emotions and Its Recognition

Research results from several fields such as cognitive psychology, social psychology,
biomechanics studies on the movements and neuroscience, allow us to define a crite-
ria set framework for the design of virtual characters able to realize realistic behavior
[21, 22]. Empirical evidence shows that behavioural expressivity is connected to non-
verbal communication, which is generally taken to be indicative of the true psycho-
logical state of a virtual character especially when the cues are negative [23, 27]. In
the communication process, a smile or another face movement can have different
meanings.
The reason for implementing artificial emotions in virtual characters is twofold:
one is to generate realistic virtual characters e.g. to support Human-Computer Interac-
tion (HCI) applications, the other is to investigate their recognition processes. For
example, research results show that human subjects are able to recognize the artificial
emotions realized using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed by [24],
which measure facial expressions by Action Units (AU). Each AU allows us to meas-
ure how few changes of the face involve more facial muscles. [24] have calculated 44
AUs that realize facial expression changes and 14 AUs that describe grossly the
changes in the direction of the look and in the orientation of the head. When AUs
occur in combination, they may be additive, in which the combination does not
change the appearance of the constituent AU, or non-additive, in which the
appearance of the constituents does change. Ekman has observed more than 7,000
combinations from which he derived specific combinations of FACS Action Units
representing prototypic expressions of emotion like joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear,
and surprise. Currently, FACS is recognized as a reference system enabling the codi-
fication all kinds of facials expressions.
Inspired by FACS, the MPEG-4 standard is particularly important for facial anima-
tion. The Facial Definition Parameters set (FDPs) and the Facial Animation Parameter
set (FAP) were designed to allow the definition of facial shape and texture, as well as
the animation of faces reproducing expressions, emotions and speech pronunciation.
FDPs are used to customize a given face model for a particular face. The FDP set
contains a 3D mesh (with texture coordinates if texture is used), 3D feature points,
and optional texture and other characteristics such as hair, glasses, age and gender.
The FAPs, on the other hand, are based on the study of minimal facial actions and
are closely related to muscle actions [28]. They represent a complete set of basic fa-
cial actions, such as squeeze or raise eyebrows, open or close eyelids, and therefore
allow the representation of most natural facial expressions. All FAPs involving
translational movement are expressed in terms of the Facial Animation Parameter

Units (FAPU). FAPUs aim at allowing interpretation of FAPs on any facial model in
a consistent way, producing reasonable results in terms of expression and speech
pronunciation. “For example, the MPEG-4-based facial animation engine for animat-
ing 3D facial models works in real time and is capable of displaying a variety of facial
expressions, including speech pronunciation with the help of 66 low-level Facial
Animation Parameters” [28, p. 91].
By contrast, the development of automated systems able to comprehend human
emotions is more complicated. The reasons are manifold, and some of these can be
summarised as follows:
1. The capabilities for modelling characters are limited. Experimental results show
the difficulties in modelling the psychological state of a virtual character and to map it
to the expression of the corresponding emotion. Other results indicate that subjects
perceive characters purely on the basis of their visual appearance or enhanced capa-
bilities.
2. Body expression and emotion perception have a high cognitive value. Face and
body both contribute in conveying the emotional state of the individual. In our natural
environment, face and body are part of an integrated whole. This correlation is prob-
lematic during the modelling of virtual character behavior. Experimental results sug-
gest that if the parametric model of a body posture is not associated with the emotion
expression, participants are not able to interpret the behavior of virtual characters.
3. Integration of facial expression and emotional body language is not present or very
poor. Electrophysiological correlates indicate that this integration of affective informa-
tion already takes place at the very earliest stage of face processing. Recognition of the
emotion conveyed by the face is systematically influenced by the emotion expressed by
the body. When observers have to make judgments about a facial expression, their per-
ception is biased toward the emotional expression conveyed by the body. [29] have
shown that “our behavioral and electrophysiological results suggest that when observers
view a face in a natural body context, a rapid (<120 ms) automatic evaluation takes
place whether the affective information conveyed by face and body are in agreement
with each other. This early ‘categorization’ into congruent and incongruent face-body
compounds requires fast visual processing of the emotion expressed by face and body
and the rapid integration of meaningful information” [p. 16522].
Another problem linked to emotion recognition concerns facial expression simula-
tion. Empirical results have manifested some problems:
1. Intensity of emotion and emotional decay, a relation that influences the recogni-
tion of neutral behavior.
2. Models of emotions. Preliminary studies on facial expression of emotion have
supported the universality hypothesis, demonstrating that people of different cultures
can display similar expressions in response to similar stimuli; for more details see
[24]. An earlier approach to studying emotions, however, came up with the idea that
specific emotions are understood in terms of scripts. This view is in opposition to the
idea that emotions are universally and easily recognized from facial expressions.
However, the FACS is a comprehensive and widely used method of objectively de-
scribing facial activity.
3. Computer animation uses different methods to create realistic animations of
emotional characters. In particular, these applications are important in the HCI field,
to create life-like synthetic characters. The limits of this field concern the realistic
behavior of emotion expression.
In any case, the great advantage of FACS is that all possible facial changes can be
recorded and catalogued. Different realistic three-dimensional virtual characters have
been developed based on FACS. The FACS allows the creation of stimuli using the
combination of different AUs. In past years, different systems have been realized in
order to automate emotion recognition. In particular, two general approaches exist:
“Feature-point systems track the locations of various landmarks on the face (e.g.,
pupils, nostrils). The feature vectors of such systems are computed as a function of
the positions and relative distances between the points. Appearance based systems, on
the other hand, process color information of face patches to form their feature vec-
tors” [30, p.xx]. Most other approaches to automated facial expression analysis so far
attempt to recognize a small set of prototypic emotional expressions (for more details
see [31]). According to [30], one of the most successful approaches to expression
recognition is the Gabor filters method that extracts features and use a vector machine
in order to classify the expressions into AU.
4 Multifunctional Aspects of the Gestural Behavior

Emotion is a crucial element in any virtual experience: virtual characters that are able
to display emotions are more likely to be able to invoke an emotional reaction in the
user and thus add to the user’s experience. Virtual characters are an important part of
the content in many applications such as entertainment, games, story-telling, training
environments, virtual therapy, and expressive interactive agents. There are a variety
of tools that can either capture or model human behavior. However, the use of these
tools is very labour intensive and it is only economical when a very specific perform-
ance is required, such as in the movie industry. When we have the necessity to use an
interactive system, we have to design virtual characters that include complex behav-
ioral aspects. The modelling of complex behaviour becomes important, because peo-
ple expect virtual characters to show realistic movements. The aim is to improve
communication and socialization within virtual environments between users and vir-
tual characters.
[32] has used meaningful postures in life-size virtual characters in order to investi-
gate the role of posture in the communication through? Interaction with final users.
The results indicate that emotional postures designed to portray anger and sad expres-
sions do not play an important role in the way participants respond to interactive vir-
tual characters. It follows that it is better to utilize no postural cues as opposed to
using incorrect postural ones. Also, this result depends on different factors, such as
the personality of each subject and tendency to attribute a mental state to a virtual
character.
Gestures are another important aspect of the interaction between virtual characters
and humans. People of all cultures and backgrounds gesticulate when they speak.
Hand movements are a natural and pervasive means adding to verbal communication.
Researchers from many fields such as psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, have
claimed that the two modalities form an integrated system of meaning during lan-
guage production and comprehension [33, 34].
[33], focusing on language production, was the first to argue that gesture and
speech make up a single, integrated system of meaning expression. He assumed that
because gesture and speech temporally overlap but convey information in two very
different ways - speech is conventionalized and arbitrary, whereas gesture is idiosyn-
cratic and imagistic - the two modalities capture and reflect different aspects of a
unitary underlying cognitive process. Thus, according to [33], gesture and speech
combine to reveal meaning that is not fully captured in one modality alone. There are
two elements of the speech-gesture relationship that are particularly interesting and
require further explanation. A crucial aspect of co-speech gestures is tight temporal
synchrony with the accompanying speech. In particular, co-speech gestures do not
make sense without the accompanying speech, and so it is very important to study
gestures in the context of the accompanying speech, that is, to study them as a com-
bined system, not as two separate things.
It is now well established in behavioral studies in psychology that gesture and
speech have an integrated relationship in language production [34] and language
comprehension. To sum up roughly, these studies have shown that producing and
comprehending speech is significantly influenced by the presence of co-speech ges-
tures. Children are also sensitive to gesture in contexts of mathematical reasoning and
learning [34, 35, 36].
From discovery of mirror neurons [37], several papers have demonstrated that the
human brain, specifically Broca’s area, also has similar “mirror properties” (for a
review, see [38]). This suggests a link between neural areas responsible for hand ac-
tions and language. This linkage between language and action areas of the brain has
been fleshed out by a number of recent experiments with humans using different types
of cognitive neuroscience methods (for a good recent review, see [39]). Indeed, sev-
eral studies have found that brain regions that process speech also process actions
made with the hand. In addition, evidence from research using Transcranial Magnetic
Stimulation (TMS, which interferes with or enhances the neural processing of stimuli)
demonstrates that when there is damage to parts of the cerebral cortex that control
hand movements, speech comprehension also suffers [37, 38]. As a different test of
whether gesture and speech form an integrated system, researchers have used Event-
Related Potentials (ERPs, measuring the brain’s electrical response to stimuli) to
explore the online processing (i.e. the immediate integration) of gesture and speech
during language comprehension [40].
Together, these studies from the field of cognitive neuroscience complement the
work from psychology showing that gesture influences the behavioral processing of
speech during language production and comprehension, and one explanation for this
behavioral finding is that gesture and speech are integrated in space and time in the
brain’s processing of this information.
5 Scheme for Virtual Character Research

In this section, we describe the taxonomy realized in order to perform a synthesis of
the major aspects involved in virtual character design. The main objective of the tax-
onomy is to describe the principal cognitive functions that are involved in the design,
development and evaluation of virtual characters. Thanks to this scheme, it is possible
to identify both computational and cognitive aspects of the virtual characters research.
Our goal is to identify which aspects influence the perception of virtual character
behavior while interacting with a human. In the last decade, many virtual character
prototypes have been developed, but hardly any uses a full integration of the existing
approaches.
For the time being, some questions remain open: how to use the research results in
order to improve the realization of the realistic virtual characters? How to avoid the
creation of new models, but to improve those extant? In our opinion it is necessary to
start updating the current state of the art in virtual characters research. For example,
cognitive neuroscience studies allow us to investigate the neural mechanism involved
while people interact with virtual agents. These experiments show to which extent the
virtual character behavior reflects human expectation in terms of believable, realism,
ability, etc.
Many other experimental studies focus on single aspects of virtual character behavior
(e.g. emotion, gesture, body movements, etc.), avoiding to integrate different abilities in
order to design a complex virtual character behavior [39, 40]. Few experimental studies
use this approach, reducing the emotions complexity and adding other abilities such as
body movements (posture and gestures), facial expression (which include eye, mouth
and lip movements). In this case, virtual characters are included in an immersive virtual
environment to explore the interaction behavior with humans.
Our taxonomy wishes to improve the conceptual scheme proposed by [41]. The
taxonomy is composed of five categories: 1) Psychological state. 2) Verbal and non-
verbal communication. 3) Cognitive processing. 4) Virtual environment. 5) Evalua-
tion method. Each category exhibits specific attributes that refer to the virtual charac-
ter behavior. Categories and attributes represent some aspects that a virtual character
should demonstrate in order to realize a believable behavioural pattern. However, this
scheme is not sufficient to specify an agent’s behavior. It just represents a summary of
the principal approaches used in virtual character research. All these categories have a
large knowledge base related to human behavior research. The combination of these
categories allows to integrate research areas with different knowledge and goals.
In the next subsection are discussed these five categories that we have drawn out
analyzing different studies about the virtual characters researchers. In particular, we
will provide some details about each category in order to clarify the content of this
scheme. The organisation of the taxonomy is modular, but each category does not
exclude the other. Our idea is to identify behavioral categories that are functional to
design virtual characters. Several studies simulate only a few attributes of these cate-
gories. By contrast, it is necessity to work on the integration of more psychological
and computational categories in order to realize virtual characters provide with
dynamic and complex behavioral patterns [42].
5.1 Psychological States - Personality
In order to create virtual characters with psychological state and emotional personality
traits it is necessary to concentrate attention on several research topics (see Table1).
Personality, emotion, self-motivation, social relationships, and behavioral capabilities
are the fundamentals for providing high-level directives for autonomous character
architecture [43].
Table 1. Description of the Psychological states – personality category
Attributes Objectives Implementation

To develop realistic animation Some models are proposed in order to
Sex of human facial models. develop life-like characters [44].
To model the internal Some models are developed for the

psychological state of the purpose of psychological studies rather
Mental states character, in order to improve than for use in the creation of virtual
interaction. characters [45].
To explore the effects of Few models are developed. These

empathy between virtual models propose a unified inductive
Empathy characters and subject. modeling system that generates
empathy behavior [46].
One the most expressive areas In recent years, many models and
of the body is the face because approaches have been used in order to
it is the area most closely create realistic movements. Different
observed during an interaction. studies use the MPEG-4 Face
The ability to model the human Animation Parameters (FAPs) [47].
Emotions
face and to animate facial
expressions is still a challenge
in the field of Computer
Graphics.
To design virtual humans Few models are created, whose aim is

implies defining the motivation to describe a motivational model of
Motivations mechanism, which control the action selection in order to realize
decision-making at each coherent behavioral plans [48].
moment in time.
First, the simulation of the psychological state requires knowing the psychological
research of how humans interact with environmental stimuli. Once this has been de-
termined, the question has to be investigated whether there is a computational model
allowing design and implementatoion of these aspects. If necessary, new models have
to be developed and evaluated to an extent coherent with the desired human personal-
ity traits behavior. Currently, the virtual characters psychological state models include
some of these aspects. In particular, many studies focus on emotion expressions.
5.2 Verbal and Nonverbal Communication
The importance of the relationship between verbal and nonverbal communication is

reflected in the number of attributes associated with this category (see Table 2). Face
and body movements are a rich source of information about human behavior. The
relationship between psychological state and facial expression as well as the associa-
tion between changes of voice and body expression during communication has been
widely studied by many researchers. In particular, body expressions (eye movements,
posture, gestures, etc.) influence the recognition of emotions.
Table 2. Description of the verbal and non-verbal communication category

The main objective of this study At present there is a wide variety of
is to realize virtual characters able applications that use different
to generate socially appropriate modalities of interaction. Recent
dialogue. With the development of systems allow the association to each
Language 3D graphics, it is now possible to phoneme of the corresponding viseme
create Embodied Agents that have and then the application of
the ability to communicate coarticulation rules [49].
verbally and non verbally.
Few models are developed. Some

The purposes of these studies studies show that observers judging a
are to improve the level of facial expression are strongly
Body co-presence, realism and influenced by emotional body language.
believability experience within They collect behavioral data and
the virtual environment. simultaneously measure electrical
event-related potentials (ERP) [29].
The aim of these studies is to Several models investigate the role of

investigate the impact of a the posture. Results indicate that
character model posture on the subjects attribute psychological states to
Posture
communication within the virtual the behavioral cues displayed by virtual
environment. characters [32].
Objective of this research is to Many models explore the role of

improve the naturalness of the gestural behavior. Different studies
virtual characters in their apply new approaches in order to
Gesture
non-verbal communication. improve gestural communication using
procedural animation [50].
The focus of these studies is to In recent years, several models have

create realistic facial animation, been developed. Many works have been
Eye movements
improving non-verbal and verbal proposed in order to animate facial
communication. muscles with speech or emotion [51].
Some expressive body movements reflect certain basic emotions. Experimental re-
sults claim that body movements help a person to cope with experiencing an emotion
and perhaps it is also possible to recognize the underlying emotions solely through the
recognition of the associated body movements. For example, den Stock et al. [42]
report on some recent experimental results indicating significant proximity between
faces and bodies in fusiform cortex consistent with the finding that fearful bodies
activate the face area in middle fusiform cortex and the finding that watching video
images of angry hands and angry faces activate largely overlapping brain areas.
5.3 Cognitive Processing
The realization of believable virtual characters requires the collaboration of many

research areas. This interdisciplinary context is necessary in order to realize virtual
characters able to perceive the stimuli from the environment, to store some informa-
tion, and to recall specific information.
For example, in computer games the use of virtual characters able to learn a spe-
cific task and to evolve their ability for that task can greatly improve the enjoyment
and the strategy of the game play. Cognitive processing is an important bridge be-
tween virtual characters and their virtual environment (see Table 3).
Table 3. Description of the cognitive processing category

The effort to create an Many studies on social interface
embodied conversational emphasize the role of Embodied
agent is a challenge that Conversional Agents (ECAs). ECAs are
pertains to different interface agents that are able to engage
multidisciplinary aspects. a user in real-time, multimodal
Multimodal
The objective of these dialogue, using verbal and nonverbal
studies s to realize virtual behaviors [52].
agents able to communicate
in multimodal way.
An embodied agent must Different studies suggest some potential

be capable of simulating “next steps” towards the creation of
Attention,
different cognitive abilities virtual autonomous characters that are
Perception,
such as attention, lifelike, intelligent and convey empathy
Memory, Learning,
perception, memory and [53].
Decision making
learning in order to improve
the multimodal behavior.
5.4 Virtual Environments
Virtual environments include virtual characters, which interact with the real users. In
this context, the unpredictable actions of the user require a highly interactive envi-
ronment that is not possible to obtain using predefined sequences of behavior (see
Table 4). It is necessary to design virtual characters able to generate autonomous
behavior.
Table 4. Description of the virtual environments category

The success of the Few models are developed. The aim
interactions relies on the of this research is to integrate the
Scenario and ability of the agents to meet virtual characters into the natural
interactions the user’s expectations, virtual environment or scenario [54].
manifesting a coherent and
believable set of behaviors.
Many studies use dynamic simulations to generate the motion of characters, which
co-operate in real time with the users’ actions. This approach provides an effective
way of generating realistic virtual character behavior in a virtual application in which
the realism is a very important aspect. Another important aspect is concerned with
testing the behavior of a virtual character while interacting with users.
5.5 Evaluation Method
The use of different paradigms and tools to design and to develop virtual characters
makes it difficult to evaluate and compare the evaluation methods (see Table 5).
Table 5. Description of the evaluation method category

The objective of these studies The proliferation of research and
is to analyze the prototypes for different application
appropriateness of the domains and the multitude of
metaphors used in the design paradigms and tools make it difficult
of the virtual character in to evaluate embodied agents. It is
Usability tests
order to obtain ideas and necessary to define a checklist that
suggestions to improve the shows the usability approach in order
simulation. to improve evaluation of the virtual
agents’ [55].
The aim of this study is to Few studies use the neuroscience

investigate neuronal method in order to investigate how
activation, in particular the subjects perceive the artificial faces.
amygdala activation, in These studies allow: verification of the
response to expression of effectiveness of artificial agents to elicit
emotions of real and virtual neuronal pattern; use of avatars for
faces. In particular, the aim of neuroimaging studies in order to
Neuroscience
the authors was to analyze investigate neuronal mechanism; use of
whether avatar facial it as a flexible agent in training
expressions are able to elicit programs and rehabilitation of patients
amygdala activation similar to with emotional dysfunctions. This study
images of real people. showed that the human brain could
distinguish an avatar from real faces
[56].
So far, some experiments have used a combination of different research methods

(qualitative and quantitative) based, partly, on Nielsen usability guidelines. A few
studies use the neuroscience method in order to investigate the cognitive process of
human subjects while interacting with virtual characters. This approach allows precise
comparison of, the subject’s response from different points of view. Other researchers
suggest the elaboration of specific guidelines in order to improve the virtual character
evaluation process.
6 Conclusion
The aim of this paper has been to elaborate a taxonomy in order to identify the behav-
ioral aspects that influence interaction among real humans and virtual characters. One
of the challenges of designing virtual characters is the definition of appropriate mod-
els, which concern the relation between realistic emotions and the different modalities
of behaviour coordination. Our goal was to provide some theoretical aspects about
virtual characters, which represent important conditions of interaction with humans.
In this paper, we have sought to identify some of the cognitive and computational
aspects that each virtual character should have.
The taxonomy introduces some cognitive aspects that most influence virtual char-
acter behavior. The next step is to work on the development of tools able to create
virtual characters capable of showing a variety of credible behaviors. The correlations
between cognitive and computational aspects could provide useful insights for the
development of a new generation of virtual characters. Virtual character behavior
should appear more spontaneous and unpredictable.
Virtual characters are an important and powerful part of virtual environment con-
tent, especially if the virtual worlds require interaction with real users. However,
research results show that users interact with virtual characters in different ways.
Many people may have a different level of interaction towards virtual characters. For
this reason, non-verbal communication is a very important aspect in the creation of
believable characters. It is clear that non-verbal communication depends on different
factors connected with virtual character applications. For example, in the eLearning
context, it is important that a virtual character show social skills, interaction, feedback
and others abilities in order to support the student.
To summarize,, we have made evident many aspects involved in the research and
design of expressive virtual characters. Many other models and approaches are used
in this field. However, all different areas of research are a challenge to researchers
that work on designing virtual characters. At the same time, it is necessary to under-
stand whether all of this research can be integrated into a single development plat-
form.
The challenge for the future is to work to integrate more skills in order to realize
virtual characters able to co-operate dynamically within their environment. We hope
that this taxonomy can stimulate researchers to develop systems not based upon single
abilities, but upon their integration.
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Usability Issues of an Augmented Virtuality Environment
for Design
Xiangyu Wang1 and Irene Rui Chen2

1
Lecturer; 2 Ph.D. Candidate
Design Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Australia
x.wang@arch.usyd.edu.au, IreneRui.Chen@gmail.com
Abstract. This paper presents a usability evaluation of an Augmented Virtuality

(AV)-based system dedicated for design. The philosophy behind the concept of
the system is discussed based on the dimensions of transportation and artificial-
ity in shared-space technologies. This system is introduced as a method that al-
lows users to experience the real remote environment without the need of
physically visiting the actual place. Such experience is realized by using AV
technology to enrich the virtual counterparts of the place with captured real im-
ages from the real environment. The combination of the physicality reality and
virtual reality provides key landmarks or features of the to-be-visited place, live
video streams of the remote participants, and 3D virtual design geometry. The
focus of this paper describes the implementation and a usability evaluation of
the system in its current state and also discusses the limitations, issues and chal-
lenges of this AV system.
Keywords: Augmented Virtuality, Mixed Reality, Virtual Environments.
1 Introduction
Augmented Virtuality (AV), similar to Augmented Reality (AR), is a type of Mixed
Reality user-interface. The taxonomy of Mixed Reality interfaces, introduced by Mil-
gram [1][2] describes methods of combining real-world and computer-generated data.
While Augmented Reality involves adding computer generated data to primarily real-
world data, Augmented Virtuality deals with predominantly real-world data being
added to a computer-generated virtual environment. Augmented Reality was investi-
gated as one solution for displaying preoperative images related to the neurosurgeon’s
view of the operative field. In some neuro-navigation systems, selected information
from preoperative images is displayed as two-dimensional (2D) monochromatic con-
tours on the right ocular of the surgical microscope [3]. This solution has certain limi-
tations. For instance, multimodal and preoperative three-dimensional (3D) images are
only displayed as 2D monochromatic contours on microscope oculars, with a result-
ing information loss [4].
A system has been presented for creating 3D AV scenes for multimodal
image-guided neurosurgery [4]. An AV scene includes a 3D surface mesh of the op-
erative field which is reconstructed from a pair of stereoscopic images. This process
acquired through surgical microscope, and 3D surfaces segmented from preoperative
152 X. Wang and I.R. Chen
multi-modal images of the patient [5]. The performance evaluation of this system is
used for a physical phantom and report the results of six surgical patients where AV
was used in conjunction with AR. The clinical advantages of this visualization ap-
proach are highlighted in the context of brain surgery, mainly surgery of cortical le-
sions located in eloquent areas where multimodal preoperative images are needed [6].
Therefore, it seems that AV systems have some advantages over AR systems in cer-
tain application circumstances.
2 Mixed Reality Boundaries Theory

Benford [7] introduces the three dimensions of transportation, artificiality, and spati-
ality as a means of classifying shared-space technologies. There are three motivations
behind this means [7]. It allows people to design trade-offs involved in determining
the costs and benefits of supporting different spatial properties such as containment,
topology, movement, and shared coordinate systems. Secondly, the gaps in the tech-
nology can be identified where new approaches might be developed so the insights
can be provided to new directions of research [7]. The final motivation is to produce a
simple and inclusive taxonomy that can help people to summary out the key princi-
ples in order to understand the primary distinctions between them [7]. This study
reflects on the relationship between dimensions of transportation and artificiality
according to the classification from shared-space technologies.
2.1 Transportation
The concept of transportation is comparable to the concept of immersion from virtual

reality. Both are in relation to an interface technology that has been designed to intro-
duce a participant into a new environment while at the same time excluding sensory
stimuli from the local environment [8]. However, there are two aspects which are
different from transportation to immersion. Firstly, transportation is unlike immer-
sion, it includes the possibility of introducing remote participants and objects into the
local environment that then becomes augmented rather than excluded. This is the
main trend in Augmented Reality and ubiquitous computing and may be an important
first point for designing technologies that need to be integrated with existing tools as
part of the daily working environment. Another difference is that transportation con-
siders how groups of participants and possibly other objects such as physical docu-
ments might be transported together. Immersion has typically been paying attention to
individual participants [9]. Even where sharable interfaces such as projected displays
have been used, the effects on and role of local objects have not been considered.
As a sub-mode of Mixed Reality (MR), Augmented Virtuality (AV) technology
can insert real contents into a predominantly virtual environment [16] and AV tech-
nology provides a means to merge a richly layered, multi-modal, 3D real experience
into a virtual environment [13]. The study we represent later is an Augmented Virtu-
ality-based system which provides the ability for a remote architect to explore a vir-
tual counterpart of a remote place that needs to be inspected for defects. The system
actually provides an experience of exploring a virtual representation of a real place.
Therefore, in this case, it characterizes the essential difference between the concepts
of local and remote.
Usability Issues of an Augmented Virtuality Environment for Design 153
2.2 Artificiality
The dimension of artificiality focuses on the extent to which a space is either syn-
thetic or is based on the physical world. This bridges the extremes from wholly syn-
thetic to wholly physical environment such as between the total synthesis of an envi-
ronment, independent of all external reality from nothing but bits in a computer to the
electronically mediated delivery of a physical place and firmly based in everyday
reality [9]. Different technologies can be located along this dimension according to
the ratio of physical to synthetic.
In the study presented here, the counterpart space explored is created to contain
real-world images as object textures by mapping certain real elements extracted from
the real space onto a virtual environment for richness. In this way, participants can
have a strong sense of involvement in the remote sense since the scene contains real
images. Especially, the photos have been taken under similar positions lighting condi-
tions. Therefore, participants can have a feeling of realism through navigating the
virtual environment.
The relationship between the transportation and artificiality can be explained in the
Fig. 1, which describes the broad classification of shared spaces according to trans-
portation and artificiality [9]. The black contour highlights the connection between
the physical reality and virtual reality for this study.
As described before, the textures can be taken from landmarks/feature objects existing
in the real space and which have dual (mirror) objects in the virtual world. This offers the
advantage of making a virtual world appear as the real world and the augmented virtual
world could be viewed as a mirrored version of the real place as show in Fig. 2.
Fig. 1. Broad classification of shared spaces according to transportation and artificiality adapted
from [9]
Fig. 2. Creating a simple mixed-reality boundary adapted from [8]
3 Research Issues for Experimentation

The prototype and implementation of the AV system has been completed as an inter-
face which enables the user to inspect remotely. It also provides a mean for distant
collaboration as well as an improved presentation of the AV space. The experimenta-
tion stage involves the controlled usability experiment to validate the concept of AV
as an intuitive interface paradigm capable of supporting remote inspection.
One usability study is devised to investigate how AV space might provide percep-
tual and cognitive support and augmentation, for individual designers interacting
within a virtual environment which contains real entities that can be potentially ex-
ploited in useful ways. Experiments should be devised in a way to study the effects of
the merging of real entities into a virtual environment on the nature of a person’s
perceptual and cognitive performance as compared with a purely real environment.
The test task(s) would be specifically designed to address issues of designer’s com-
prehension and retention of spatial information. Furthermore, usability engineering
approaches would be adopted to perform meaningful usability evaluation of the AV
spaces. For example, special usability questionnaires and associated data collection
strategies would be developed in order to assess certain features of AV space, such as
extent of presence. The authors will base the development of the questionnaires on the
authors’ previous work [14] and widely accepted theoretical models such as the
model of presence [15] that can be easily generalized to the AV case.
4 Methods
The prototype implementation of the AV system has been completed currently as an
interface for users to collaborate remotely. The experimentation stage is to validate
the concept of AV as an effective interface paradigm capable of supporting remote
collaboration. The AV system is customized as the experimental facility used as the

vehicle for experimentation presented in the next section.
4.1 Experiment Setup
The steps for setting up the AV system have been described as follows:
1) Make sure all three computers are running Max/Msp with Jitter properly.
2) Make sure all three computers are on the network, and obtain the IP address
3) Install a web cam, better to be DirectX compatible
4) Connect each computer to the corresponding projection screen.
5) The three computers are arranged in a master – slaves’ structure (one master and
two slaves). There are three different version called “projects’ in the program
folder. You should run the appropriate corresponding “project” program file.
Also, the IP address should be adjusted to the corresponding position of com-
puter. Therefore, the multi –projection system has been built for the AV envi-
ronment (See Fig. 3 for details).
6) The computer controlling the middle computer is the “master”. The input to this
computer controls the movement in the AV environment (forward, backward,
turn right, turn left )
7) The sensors are also connected to the middle computer via USB. The port num-
ber is fixed so don’t change it to other USB socket.
After everything is setup, when you step on the sensors, in the program (the
“project” file), the corresponding objects would flash as you step. Then the
program is ready to run.
This empirical study is devised to investigate how AV environment might provide
perceptual and cognitive support and augmentation, for designers interacting within a
virtual environment which contains real entities that can be potentially exploited in
useful ways. This study involves individual usage of the AV environment to explore
the potential usability issues involved in the system. The purpose of the study is to
investigate whether human’s capability of comprehending the spatial information and
Fig. 3. Multi -Projection System

Fig. 4. Two remote participants work in different locations adapted from [13]
effecting desired actions based on the resulting mental model constructed from per-
ceiving the AV space is improved compared against real-world experience. This
study was devised in a way to study the effects of the merging of real entities into a
virtual environment on the nature of a person’s perceptual and cognitive performance
as compared with a purely real environment. Furthermore, this study was conducted
to investigate human’s experience (e.g., the sense of presence) that results from the
interpretation of the mental model constructed within the AV space. Usability ques-
tionnaires were developed in order to assess certain usability features of the AV
space, such as extent of presence. The development of the questionnaires was based
on the Wang and Dunston’s previous work [16] and widely accepted theoretical mod-
els such as the model of presence [17] that can be easily generalized to the AV case.
In addition, this system can be focused on validating the collaborative benefits offered
by the system. The test task(s) can be collaborative design defects inspection between
two remote participants shown as in Fig. 5), which are specifically designed to ad-
dress issues of designer’s comprehension and retention of spatial information. One
can use the multi-projection systems to walk through the AV environment as shown
in the right side of the Fig.4. Another one can wear the Head Mountain Display
(HMD) to explore the AV environment as inserted in the left side of the Fig.4. They
can work as a team to collaborate remotely.
5 Experiment
The purpose of the usability experiment is to investigate whether human’s capability
of comprehending the spatial information and effecting desired actions based on the
resulting mental model constructed from perceiving the AV space is improved
compared with completely real environments. Furthermore, the experiment was con-
ducted to investigate human’s experience (e.g., the sense of presence) that results
from the interpretation of the mental model constructed within the AV space.
This experiment has been conducted, where participants worked on several usabil-
ity tasks and then completed a set of questionnaires. The experiment took about one
hour including time to complete the questionnaires. This experiment involves individ-
ual usage of the AV environment to reveal the potential usability issues involved in
the system. The second experiment was implemented in the context of practical appli-
cation where photo-based method was used as the benchmark to compare with the AV
system in their effectiveness of inspecting defects remotely, in order to validate the
spatial benefits provided by the 3D AV space. Each session took about one hour
including time to complete the questionnaires. Six human subjects were invited to
attend the experiment to perform tester task(s) in the following environments. The
subjects are from various backgrounds such as architecture, IT, accounting and
finance. The ages are around 25 to 29.
5.1 Experimental Procedure
An AV environment is provided to the participants. The experimental task is to

explore the AV environment provided, and draw a sketch layout map of it. The par-
ticipants can draw down everything that appears to be part of the environment.The
participants are expected to carefully explore the computer-generated AV space and
record as many details as possible (e.g., the relative size of different rooms, size of
furniture, the orientation and etc). It was suggested that the participants should record
any significant marker, pattern, or picture which helps them to perform the task.
The participants were also recommended to record any objects from the photo back-
ground but seems to be part of the environment space. At any point, where draft draw-
ing is not applicable, participants can always write shorts comments to explain in detail.
In another section, a set of print photos of the real space/place are provided to the
participant. These photos were taken from different positions and perspectives to
cover the entire sight of the real place. A general 2D site map of this space is also
provided to the participant. The task is to identify the defects from the photo, and
record them in details on the site map.
After identifying all the defects, the participant should redesign the arrangement of
interior space. Firstly, they should identify all the entrance/exit and the locations of
emergency equipment of this space, and draw the possible walk flow. Then, partici-
pants need to rearrange the furniture to the appropriate place. During the process, the
participant should also take into consideration of the nature of the functions at differ-
ent areas of the space. The same task and procedure were required to be implemented
using the AV system in the second session.
In this study, a pre-defined AV environment is given to the participants. The ex-
perimental task is to explore the AV environment and then sketch out its layout and
also fill in the post-session questionnaires for their experience and reflections. The
participants should draw down everything that appears to be part of the environment
and is useful for them to mentally re-construct the given virtual environment. The
participants are expected to carefully explore the computer-generated AV space and
memorize as many details as possible (e.g., the relative sizes of different rooms, size
and orientation of furniture, etc). It is suggested that the participants should memorize
the layout of the environment based on landmarks and features while navigating. At
any point where sketching is not applicable, the participants can always write short
comments to explain.
6 Development of Questionnaires
Firstly, some questions regarding the participant’s background need to be investigated

such as if the participants feel comfortable to work on computers. There are some
options from dislike, neutral, comfort and others for them to describe. Another essen-
tial question is that if they have been playing AV which helps to locate computer
gamers. The result shows three participants found it’s comfortable and another three
participants found it’s neutral. The reason to ask these questions is that if certain data
in the following questionnaires seems special among the others, their background
information might be an influence to see if there is a correlation between their back-
ground and particular data. There is one participant who has 5 to 10 years experience
and another one who has no experience at all with playing video games. The others
have less than 5 years experience.
There are 18 items (see Fig. 5) for users to complete in this pilot study. The rating
for the experience for each question was categorized with none, poor/mild, moderate,
good and excellent. Corresponding to this rating scale, the numeric scale was set from
1 (none) to 5 (excellent). In the first study, these eighteen questions have been
designed to cover six major aspects including sense, recognition, mechanism,
consistency, environment reflection and distraction. Furthermore, the sensory part is
considered as the being present, object moving, orientation and environment
reflection. The relationships between these aspects are shown in Fig. 5.
Sense Recognition
Being Mechanism
presence
Interaction
Orientation
Object Environment
moving reflection
Fig. 5. Questionnaire Structure

The 18 questions have been designed to categorized from the sense, recognition,
mechanism and the interaction. Furthermore, the sensory part has been considered
from the being present, object moving, orientation and environment reflection. The
relation between these aspects can be shown in a structure as depicted in Table 1.
Table 1. List of Questionnaires
No Structure Questions Average

1 Sense How strong was your sense of being present in the AV 3.50
environment?
2 Sense How strong was your sense of objects being present in 4.00
the AV environment?
3 Sense How strong was your sense of object moving in the AV 3.00
environment?
4 Sense How strong was the sense of movement (yourself) in 3.50
the AV environment?
5 Sense How strong was the sense of presence in the AV 3.33
environment provided by the multi-projection system
comparing with single desktop display?
6 Sense How well could you maintain the sense of direction in 3.33
the AV environment?
7 Sense How strong is the realistic feeling of the AV 3.50
environment?
8 How well could you actively examine virtual objects in 3.67
the environment?
9 recognition How well do you recognize the AV environment from 4.17
the real environment?
10 recognition To what extent did the environment seem realistic to 3.50
you?
11 recognition To what extent did your movements in the AV 3.17
environment seem natural to you?
12 Mechanisms To what extent did the mechanisms which controlled 3.00
your movements in the environment seem natural to
you?
13 Consistency To what extent did your experience of the experiment 2.83
seem consistent with your real world experience?
14 Environment To what extent did the environment's reactions to your 3.17
reflection action seem realistic?
15 Distraction How much efforts did your spend when looking at the 2.67
multi-projection screen system?
16 Environment How responsive was the AV environment to actions 3.50
Reflection that you preformed?
17 Distraction To what extent did the control devices distract you 4.00
from performing assigned tasks?
18 Distraction To what extent did the multi- projection display 3.00
distract you from performing assigned tasks?
The presence in the context of this study includes self-presence reflected by the
question 1 and the object presence reflected by the question 2. Question 3 and 4 con-
sidered participants’ sense of movements of themselves and the objects respectively.
In particular, the question 5 asked the participant to compare the sense of presence in
the context of the multi-projection system and the traditional desktop display. More-
over, the feeling for realism has influences on the recognition for human. Therefore,
some aspects such as the sense of direction and the responsive performance were
examined by question 8 to 11. The consistency as reflected by the question 13 was
compared between the real world experience and the virtual environment. Another
aspect in the questionnaire was focused on the realism of the AV environment’s re-
sponses to actions from participants as measured by the question 14 and 15.
7 Results for Data Analysis and Interpretation

Question 1 to 7 in Table 1 aimed to investigate the sensory aspects in the AV envi-
ronment. The average rating score for these seven questions (3.5/5.0) showed that the
participants gained a better sense from the AV environment. Initially, it was noted
that the average rating of the sense of being present in the AV environment was
3.5/5.0, compared with the 4.0/5.0 for the sense of objects being present in the AV
environment. The question 3 and 4 focused on the sense of movements. It is necessary
to discern the differences between the average rating 3.5/5.0 for the sense of partici-
pant movement and 3.0/5.0 for the sense of objects movement in the AV environ-
ment. It implied that the AV system might enable participants to control their own
movements (e.g., participants could navigate the AV space through the sensor pad
with 4 arrows in four directions) in a natural way.
It was also observed that the multi-projection system provided more sense of pres-
ence in the AV environment as compared with single desktop displays from the score
of 3.33/5.0. However, many subjects complained about the dumbness of the sensor
pad. It may be because of the navigational cue that the participants haven’t really been
adapted from traditional mice and keyboard combination to the sensor pad.
Both the sketches and the rating for question 6 (3.33/5.0) showed that it was help-
ful to use the AV system to maintain the sense of direction in the AV environment.
Particularly, all the participants had no trouble to recognize the orientation through
the drawing and identify most of defects in the AV environment (see an example of a
sketch from one participant in Fig.6). They could accurately place the main entry,
main door and classrooms in correct orientation and good order, even the location of
the toilet, however, they might have problems with the exact locations of tables and
chairs. It was apparent that the participant could accurately draw the location of ob-
jects in details with the interaction of the AV system. Objects such as desks, draws,
windows/exits could be well recognized and memorized from the AV space. In con-
trast you can see the drawing based on photos from Fig. 7 that the participant hardly
can locate any detailed defects except the entries and exits. Similar positive perform-
ance results were also observed from other participants’ sketches. However, this is the
first time the participants had been experiencing and interacting with the AV system.
If more training were allowed, the performance results should have been even better.
As apparently shown in the consistent ratings from the question 7 and 10 (both
were rated as 3.5/5.0), most participants found that the AV environment looked quite
natural and realistic as the real world. The rating for the question 8 (3.67/5.0) sug-
gested that the AV system can well support participants to actively examine virtual
objects. The sensor pad-based navigation enabled the participants to control the
distances from the objects for a closer view. The questions 9 to 11 focused on the
issue of recognition. The average from these values was 3.61 which implied that
Fig. 6. An example of how students address the defects with descriptions while using the AV
environment
Fig. 7. An example of how students address the defects with descriptions while using the
photo-based method
participants could have a natural perspective on the virtual objects inside the AV
environment. The average rating 4.17 among the highest rank 5.0 for the question 9
strongly indicated the high level of realism rendered in the AV environment.
Regarding the consistency of the experience in the AV environment with the real
world experience, the rating (2.83/5.0) from the question 13 indicated that the 3D
modeling of the AV environment needs to be improved. For example when partici-
pants navigated the space, sometimes they might hit the wall. Unfortunately, the cur-
rent AV system was not able to model the realistic wall and participants’ responses.
Such interactive behaviors should be modeled to improve the realism and the com-
plexity of the AV environment.
The question 17 and 18 considered the distraction issue from the performance. For
this question, it has been explained to the users that 1 represents the worst case. And 5
is the least distraction. In this case, distractions partially came from the forced en-
gagements of participants’ feet in the sensor pad for navigation and the physical and
psychological adaptation to the vection created by the multi-projection system. The
phenomenon of vection in human perceptual systems studies is basically defined as
visually induced perception of self motion. Question 17 rated the distraction level
from the use of sensor pad as 4.0/5.0. In contrast, question 18 rated the distraction
from multi-projection display as 3.0/5.0.
As mentioned from the previous section, participants’ background information was
taken into account together with the data from questionnaires. Special attention was
paid to those who had no previous experience in virtual environments. Rating results
did not help to infer any correlation between participants’ background and their per-
ceptions on the system for this study.
8 Limitation and Future Work

Early experiments [10] with virtual reality technology have suggested that while the
degree of presence experienced may increase with the degree of immersion, other
factors also make a profound contribution. These include whether users can see their
own virtual body images [11] or the use of physical walking as a means of moving
through a virtual environment [11]. The same distinction can be seen in shared-space
technologies. Although the system presented in [12] is a highly transporting interface
through a combination of large-screen displays and background substitution with real
scene, the users in the experimentation remained aware that they were standing in
their own physical space. The system presented in this paper can be used for both
individual and two pair participants for collaborative design activities. The possible
collaboration can be considered such as the way mentioned in the section 4.1 as
shown in Fig. 5. However, the system might not be appropriate for more than two
participants, because navigation through the virtual environment cannot be easily
tracked. Furthermore, with more participants, it is difficult to maintain forms of spa-
tial referencing, such as gazing direction whereby participants cannot infer who is
present to whom at any moment in time from the virtual representation.
The rendering time for the models in the real scene takes time to process, so some-
times the system might not give instant feedback from the instant movement of par-
ticipants. Therefore, this system can be improved for further experimentation in the
near future. A larger scale of experimentation could reveal more usability issues.
9 Conclusion
This paper presents a usability evaluation of the Augmented Virtuality (AV)-based
system for design. This AV system allows participants to experience the real remote
environment without the need to physically stepping out of the work stations. The
usability study with invited subjects was conducted and the results showed that the
AV system is generally helpful and supportive for designers to achieve better sense of
involvement in the remote scene and it could solve some problems with low cost such
as landscape design. Designers do not need to visit different places and collect all the
information from past to now, the AV system could save them high cost to investigate
how to evaluate and solve the problem for the overall urban design and planning in
certain circumstances.
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The Managed Hearthstone: Labor and Emotional Work
in the Online Community of World of Warcraft
Andras Lukacs, David G. Embrick , and Talmadge Wright
Loyola University Chicago

alukacs@luc.edu,
dembrick@luc.edu,
twright@luc.edu
Abstract. Prior analyses of player interactions within massive multi-player

online environments (MMOs) rely predominantly on understanding the envi-
ronments as spheres of leisure—places to “escape” the stress of the “real
world.” We find in our research on the World of Warcraft, a popular online
role-playing game suggests that, in fact, social interaction within the game more
closely resembles work. Successful play requires dedicated participants who
choose to engage in a highly structured and time-consuming “process” of game
progression. Simultaneously, players must also actively engage in the “emo-
tional labor” of acceptably maintaining standards of sociability and guild mem-
bership constructed by their gaming peers. We posit that these expectations of
both structured progression work and emotional maintenance work significantly
blur the existing lines between categorizing work and leisure. While the as-
sumption of leisure shrouds the general expectation of gaming interaction, we
suggest a “play as work” paradigm more clearly captures the reality of the de-
mands of The World of Warcraft.
Keywords: emotional labor, work, video games, World of Warcraft, sociability,

MMORPG, interaction patterns, social dynamics.
1 Introduction
2008 was an exceptionally successful year for the video game entertainment industry
- despite the slumping global economy, freezing credit markets and plummeting oil
prices, the total hardware, software and peripheral sales of the industry climbed to an
annual $22 billion, entertainment software sales compromising $11.7 billion of the
total revenue [1]. Sales in December exceeded $5 billion, partly due to the release of
Blizzard’s new expansion (Wraith of the Lich King) of the subscription-based mas-
sively multiplayer online World of Warcraft in late November. Within the first day of
availability the expansion sold more than 2.8 million copies and the game was played
by more than 11.5 million subscribers worldwide by the end of 2008 [2]. Recent re-
search indicates that 40% of Americans and 83% of American teenagers are regular
video game players. According to Williams et al., while stereotypical images of the
isolated teenager boy gamers persist, the average player age is 33 years old and 1 in 4
users are women [3].
166 A. Lukacs, D.G. Embrick , and T. Wright
Since the advent of the commercially available video games in the 1970s, techno-
logical advancement in hardware, software and communication technology have
allowed game designers to transform gaming experience from simple hand/eye coor-
dination-based single-player applications to persistent, multi-user three-dimensional
virtual worlds. The most popular game spaces are persistent virtual realms, massively
multiplayer online games (MMOs henceforth), such as the combat- based World of
Warcraft or Second Life which is primarily a social environment. These games are
vibrant sites of social and cultural production where regular and lasting social
relationships develop [4]. In fact, a number of researchers argue that with the disap-
pearance of public spaces, online game environments have became central sites of
community building [5]. While the most popular MMOs are constant topics of media
criticism and were analyzed from the standpoint of literally criticism, narrative analy-
sis [6] and psychology [7], critical sociological investigations of game audiences are
less frequent.
One of the first theories of persistent users was developed by Richard Bartle. In a
1996 article [8] he distinguished four types of players: achievers, socializers, explor-
ers and killers. While these categories are useful to conceptualize ideal-type audience
behaviors in virtual worlds, contemporary MMO players are omnivores, displaying a
multitude of orientations towards the game at the same time. T.L. Taylor [9] catego-
rizes players as casual and powergamers in the EverQuest game environment. In her
definitions powergamers engage in instrumentally rational play to become as power-
ful as possible, often bordering on cheating. On the other hand, casual gamers are not
as goal oriented but focus on building relationships.
While these categories could guide us to better understand the social dynamics of
virtual realms, they are limited in that too much autonomy is given to players who are
often viewed by researchers as playing such games in order to get away from the
structural and ritualistic rigors of everyday life. We argue that while that approaches
centered on escapism from the alienation and “disenchantment” of everyday life re-
mains generally true, it is additionally true that online gaming also represents an ex-
tension of everyday life; often online environments are created in a way that replicates
existing social structures. For example, though the trade system in World of Warcraft
is one where players trade gold and silver for merchandise of interest, it is also very
much a replica of the capitalist market system in which most of the players reside in
real life. Similarly, while the dynamics of the game may be fantastic (e.g., playing
avatars who represent elves, dwarves, etc.), how players socialize and interact with
one another in the online environment often parallel how players socialize and inter-
act with one another in the real world.
We would like to suggest a different metaphor to approach the experience of play-
ers: we suggest a new analytical model for understanding 21st century play that puts
work at the center. Of course work has various meanings. For example, gold farming
companies, like IGE.com marketing itself as the “leading MMORPG1 Service Com-
pany”, operate within game environments. Meanwhile, independent developers make
essential modifications (mods) and add-ons for various games available at no cost
[10]. Our metaphor of work is more inclusive: we are interested in the work of being
1
MMORPG is the abbreviation of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, a sub-
genre of MMOs.
The Managed Hearthstone: Labor and Emotional Work in the Online Community 167
an active player within these persistent virtual worlds, in particular World of Warcraf
- the organization of guilds, management of raiding and the emotional labor success-
ful (and failed) gaming sessions require. Our central question is how do players rec-
tify with the fact that what they think of as “play” sometimes becomes so structured
and limited as to become confused with notions of “work”.
2 Literature Review
While the social science literature on human play is not abundant, the importance of
play did not escape the attention of many leading psychologists (e.g., Erikson [11],
Freud [12], Piaget [13] or Csikszentmihalyi [14]). One of most important early game
studies is Johan Huzinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of Play-Element in Culture [15]. In
the opening chapters of his book Huzinga uses the allegory of “magic circle” to define
play as a voluntary, secluded and limited activity which is separate from ordinary life.
While the magic circle offers a theoretical starting point for many scholars, it has been
criticized for setting-up artificial boundaries between the “real world” and “play
worlds” (e.g., Henricks [16]).
Juliet B. Schor in her brilliant book, The Overworked American [17], rejects the
subjective categorical divide of work as unpleasant and mandatory and leisure as an
enjoyable, discretionary activity. There are many problems with this approach: work
can be enjoyable, in fact some people do not have to work, yet they decide to. Or, as
Arlie Russell Hochschild [18] highlights, sometimes work can feel like home and
home like work. To operationalize the distinction between work and leisure, Schor
concentrates on defining the former as paid employment and household labor while
the rest of human activity falls under the category of leisure. We contend that the
available data from persistent virtual worlds suggests that this definition is inadequate
to understand play and work in the 21st century: the boundaries between the two are
more blurred than ever.
It has been suggested by scholars to approach virtual worlds from the standpoint of
work. Nick Yee’s short paper, The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the
Boundaries of Work and Play [19], argues that for many users gameplay is an obliga-
tion, it becomes a tedium and feels more like a second (or third) job than entertain-
ment. Scott Rettberg maintains that gameplay subconsciously socializes players into a
capitalist paradigm. The equation between work and play in MMOs is a sustained
delusion that enables players to waste time without understanding, that in fact, they
are acquiring skills upon which contemporary capitalism thrives: leadership, conflict
management, managerial training and networking [20].
The organization of successful guilds and the management of raiding resemble tra-
ditional, Taylorist labor management practices. As Harry Braverman [21] points out
in his classic work on labor, modern production is unimaginable without some form
of direct control over the labor machine, which is broken down into multiple opera-
tions performed by different workers. The management and administrative apparatus
controls the entire work process: the gathering of workers, length of the workday,
enforcement of rules (talking, leaving, smoke breaks, etc.) and the mode of execution.
Although Braverman’s work is not without its shortcomings (it neglects workers
resistance and places too much emphasis on Taylorism (Storey [22]), ultimately it
provides game researchers with a useful tool to understand the organization of social
groups within persistent virtual worlds.
Citizens of MMOs not only experience and participate in the bureaucratic, work-
like organizations of guilds and raid groups, but they also perform tremendous emo-
tional labor, suppressing feelings (e.g., anger, frustration, anxiety, etc.) to sustain
proper state of minds to continue the play session. Arlie Hochschild [23] believes that
emotional work is part of the modern work process and the symbolic and often in-
strumental displaywork is inseparable from the structural understanding of the labor
practice. The transmutation of emotion is the link between a private act of enjoying
something and the public display of enjoyment regardless of state of mind. Indeed,
The Managed Heart argues that transmutation is often unconscious and depends on
three factors:
1. emotion work is performed to maintain team solidarity
2. feelings rules are not discretionary, but bureaucratically or textually
controlled
3. social exchange is forced into narrow channels allowing limited
display of individual emotional stances
Frequent rule reminders maintain the ongoing process of emotional labor, and while
failed transmutations frequently remain invisible, when they do surface, they are often
punished by management.
Based on our data, we maintain that modern play in persistent virtual realms
smears the distinction between work and play; users perform both at the same time.
The game structure establishes social organizations resembling Taylorist management
and control practices. Further, successful play depends on emotion management and
emotional labor. If the displaywork fails, gaming sessions often come to a sudden
halt, while failed management of the play-work encounter could lead to the break-up
of larger social structures, guilds. Some players attempt to escape the work aspect of
the game, yet there is little room for resistance – only through the rejection of the
game can people escape. However, the deeper question is whether working and play-
ing at the same time is something we need to escape at all.
3 Methodology
The data for our study come from ethnographic observations of player social interac-
tions on four North American servers (henceforth referred to as Hearthstone) in World
of Warcraft. Since we are specifically interested in “how” online players navigate an
environment where work and leisure are blurred, the qualitative approach of Marshall
and Rossman [24] is “uniquely suited” to answer questions that require researchers to
probe deeper than traditional survey methods might allow. More specifically, we
employ critical ethnography in order to best address and acknowledge the role of
media institutions—including online gaming environments—in reproducing and rein-
forcing race, gender, class, and other social inequalities (see Anderson [25], Anderson
and Herr [26], and Marshal [27]).
To best understand the nature of play and work in multiple multi-user online game
environments and explore whether players across different servers had similar
experiences about work and leisure, we logged more than 150 days of playing time in
the World of Warcraft on different US game servers. We recorded data both on the
Horde and Alliance side, playing in Player-Versus-Environment (PVE) and Player-
Versus-Player (PVP) settings and experiencing Role Playing situations on RP servers.
We went through the process of grinding eighty levels multiple times, raided end-
game instances, entered Arenas and Battlegrounds with our comrades, developed
social networks through our guild affiliations, experienced tensions, frustrations,
boredom, success and pleasure during our sessions.
We collected most of the data used in this paper while playing end-game content,
10 and 25 man raid instances2. Throughout these gaming sessions we took screenshots
of noteworthy chat discussions, sketched notes and used voice recording software to
capture relevant conversations, because typed chat communication is usually limited
when voice chat is used by players to coordinate their activities. While self-critical,
self-conscious and self-reflective about our methodology, we believe that our critical
ethnography “reveal truths that escape those who are not so bold” (Fine [28], 290) to
approach the idiosyncratic, mundane and taken for granted events in virtual realms
with such methodological vigor.
We complemented our participant observation with eight informal interviews tak-
ing place in the game. We used snowball sampling and ended up with 5 male and 3
female respondents. Interviews lasted between 20 minutes and one hour. We under-
stand that the this small sample does not provide an accurate representation of the
larger Hearthstone population, yet as critical field workers we maintain that language
and discourse are essential to understand the lived experience of players, thus we
reject scientific positivism [29]. We asked fellow players about their game experi-
ence, about guild life in general, their struggles to find time to raid, the process of
raiding and the frustration and pleasure of being a citizen of Azeroth3.
After the data from the participant observations and interviews were transcribed,
one of the authors read all of the material to extract common themes and patterns.
The findings were then coded in a two-stage process following the “grounded theory
model” (see Glaser and Strauss [30]).
4 Analysis
4.1 Leveling
A common idea among players of World of Warcraft is that while the leveling proc-
ess is necessary and sometimes fun, the “game starts at level 80”. Given the complex-
ity of game mechanics and social interaction at end-game content, this is echoed by
many players throughout Azeroth. During the last two years Blizzard introduced
measures to ease the grind of leveling characters and reaching top levels faster: more
experienced gained in lower levels, faster transportation methods (mounts) available
earlier, items granting extra experience points while leveling or starting a special
character class at level 55. Despite all these changes in the game design, leveling is
still a tedious activity that could take up to 15-20 days of logged game time. Some
people reject the notion that the ultimate playing experience is end-game content, as
this male user described:
2
Raid instances are high level dungeons designed to provide challenge for experienced players.
3
Azeroth is the name of the fantasy world players inhabit.
You will hear people saying that the game starts at level 70. That is plain ol’
bs. If you are not having fun leveling, you should not play at all.
Others only played with special low level characters, called twinks. These characters
are extremely powerful and optimized for low level PvP Battlegrounds. Because
twinks do not require leveling or further progression once created, players are able to
participate with fewer time constraints and guild expectations. This transforms the
game experience. Players who are looking for escape from the organizational and
emotional work of end-game content but continue playing are often “twinking”.
However, it is worth noting that because of the expensive items twinks require, to
create a successful character, one needs the help of some high level friends. In fact,
creating these types of characters entail extremely careful planning and the most so-
phisticated leveling and gearing procedure one can imagine: twinks are the kings of
instrumentally rational gameplay. As a female player described her transition from
end-game content to twinks:
I play with twinks, because it is still fun. You can log on, play 30 min and log
off. I don’t even have a main4 anymore. Getting raid ready and raid took up
so much time.
Nonetheless, the majority of users will go through the pressure-filled leveling process.
The structure of the game only partially contributes to this pressure. The main sources
are social pressures: players trying to level fast and keep-up with their friends and
guild members. Given the multiplicity of add-ons and helper applications available to
support players through the leveling process, even users who log similar amounts of
hours could find themselves at different levels, and thus, unable to play together. As
one guild members shouted out in guild chat:
Hey Raya! You level so freaking fast. I keep grinding so we can quest to-
gether, but you are always ahead of me.
On the other hand, guilds sometimes ask players to level faster so certain positions in
the raids could be filled. In extreme cases these expectations require 12-15 hours of
playtime a day. In this instance a guild needed a level 80 druid:
Ennui: Elwis, I need a druid tank by Saturday.
Elwis: You are only giving me 3 days to hit 80? I am halfway to 74.
Flex: I doubt you can do it.
Elwis: I’ll do my best. I can manage 3 levels a day. Maybe. If I don’t get
bored >.<
Ynn: How the hell does one do 2-3 levels in one day?
Of course, occasionally, these requests and goals are unobtainable, yet the pressure
still exists. During our efforts to level characters in the game, we experienced tensions
among players and the break-up of leveling guilds due to social pressures5:
4
A high level character, usually the most powerful character of a player.
5
Leveling guilds usually have few high level characters. There are guilds mostly focusing on
end-game content without rejecting lower level characters (casual raiding guilds) and hard-
core raiding guilds. The latter require not-only max level characters, but experienced, ex-
tremely powerful and committed players. Of course the variety of guilds are enormous (PvP,
Role Playing, Twink Guilds for instance), yet the above three are the most common.
[Poople has left the guild]

Zuul: What the hell is that all about? He was one of the guild leaders.
Klothor: Probably can’t stand the pressures of leveling ☺
[Later Poople explained his decision to leave in a private chat]
Poople: Me and Mik has moved to my sis’ old guild (very small but no pres-
sure). You are welcomed to join.
[Days after the exodus of players, the original guild disbanded]
Because similar level characters usually play together, leveling guilds have a ten-
dency to develop small cliques, alienating higher or lower level players. This causes
low social solidarity on the guild level due to the lack of exposure and common goals.
This is one of the reasons leveling guilds have a tremendous turnover and players
reaching the maximum level often leave to join more organized groups aimed at ex-
ploring end-game content.
At the end of the leveling process, when the final “ding” comes, players announce
their achievement through guild or public channels, drawing mechanical congratula-
tions – in fact some players have a macro button on their action bar congratulating
others, so they do not need to type:
There are some many freaking achievements and new levels. This is so easy
now. I just push the gratz (sic) button and can go about my business.
While reaching level 80 is a huge milestone in the game, to experience end-game
content, players must engage in reputation grinding, gold and gear farming just to be
powerful enough to step inside a raiding instance or rated Arena battleground.
4.2 End-Game
Players reaching the maximum level do not gain any more experience points, instead
the aim of the game becomes raiding or player versus player battle. Both require tre-
mendous team effort and organization, and while the following data is focusing on the
management and emotional labor of participating in guild organized raids, PvP teams
are assembled in similar ways and experience the same problems. Nick Yee’s Dragon
Slaying 101: Understanding the Complexity of Raids [31] is a great point of entry to
grasp the various problems raids experience: mobilization, management, communica-
tion, ground rules, knowledge and expertise are the most important variables upon
which successful raiding session depend.
The first step in the process of raiding is to have a knowledgeable raid leader, who
extensively studies the raid instance, have knowledge of all the challenges ahead,
understands the mechanics of all the classes in the game, have great communication
skills and able to manage and coordinate 10 or 25 people throughout the entire raiding
sessions, which can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 12 hours. This is a huge com-
mitment usually shouldered by guild officers who become raid leaders.
Members of the raiding group are carefully selected given the division of labor
within the raid. Various tasks are divided among participants: the leader designates
tanks, melee classes, healers, ranged damage etc. Since there are limited spots avail-
able to participate, selection is a point of contestation within guilds, sometimes lead-
ing to internal guild problems:
Juki: I will leave the guild. I’m sick and tired of planning to raid on
Thursday night, organize my whole life around it - just to be demoted as an
alternative.
Vigi: Sorry man, we already have a hunter in the group. Maybe next week.
Juki: No hard feelings, but I want to raid. Bye.
[Juki leaves the guild]
Other players leave guilds not because they are not invited to raid, but because the
guild is not organized enough to conduct raids:
Kasa: would you guys be mad if I lefted (sic)?
Homaru: /cry
Spralio: not me, but why?
Kasa: lol
Kasa: [Guild] is looking for healers for Kara6...and even though I’m not
geared for Kara yet they said I can still run with them
Kasa: and I do want good gear...so I think thats the best way for me to get it.
Spralio: go for it
Kasa: since we rarely ever run anything here lol.
Players usually complete daily repeatable quests gaining money and reputation to be
able to purchase essential items required to participate in a raid: magic potions and
elixirs, weapons, reagents for spells, etc. Money is also needed to repair damaged
equipment before, during and after the raid encounter. Raiding is expensive and un-
prepared players can ruin the experience of 10 or 25 other players participating in the
raid. For this reason, guilds often lay down ground rules for the minimum requirement
to join a raid. For instance, the following is part of a casual raiding guild’s rules:
1. Once a raid is formed and the group is set the raid leader will give an
indication of when we will begin.
2. You are expected to already have all of the potions, reagents and buff food
you will need for at least four hours of raiding.
3. Every raid member is responsible for their own reagents, potions, etc.;
these will not be provided by the guild, and you are expected to have them.
4. Anyone not present, away from keyboard or ill prepared come time to
begin will be replaced.
People not having enough money, adequate equipment or supplies are a common
cause of friction during play sessions. While players often do not vocalize their disap-
proval of unprepared teammates, thus performing emotional labor, sometimes these
transmutations fail:
How come you don’t have money for repair and pots? I mean, don’t you do
your dailies???
Most players, who have finished the leveling process, make an effort to complete
some daily quests during their playing sessions to make some money. One player can
complete 25 daily quests every day, and it is not uncommon to see players logging in
only to complete some of them in order to be ready to raid in the future:
6
An entry level instance when the level cap was 70.
Man, these dailies are so freaking boring. I don’t have time to play, so I just
log to do them before I go to bed so I have money
During raids leaders monitor players’ by using third party add-on software, such as
Recount, which reports data on the work performed by each individual – not unlike
various supervisory applications in work environments (For a longer discussion of
monitoring performance, see Taylor [32]) . Communication is often through VOIP
(voice over IP) software, because typing in traditional chat slows down the raid pro-
gression and does not allow quick commands when plan modifications are necessary
during an encounter. However, most guilds restrict the use of the voice channel to the
raid leader and select officers. Players are expected to leave their computers only
during designated breaks. The use of technology to completely monitor performance,
restricted communication and control of break time clearly resemble the Taylorist
organization of work discussed by Braverman. For someone who is not playing the
game, this sounds restrictive. However, players usually do not resist the organization
of raids; this is the most effective way to achieve the goal which is to defeat bosses in
the instance and upgrade one’s equipment from the looted goods.
While the distribution of acquired goods is often highly structural (for instance raid
members with immaculate attendance history receiving priority over more casual raid
members), loot distribution is also primary example of emotional transmutation
within World of Warcraft. Guild and raid rules often control emotional display, thus
players are discouraged from excess chatting during the process. Players encourage
positive emotional display (however mechanical it might be). Congratulations are an
expected response to new equipment /items received from the raid leader7. One could
argue that this maintains group solidarity. On the other hand, the display of disap-
proval is often forbidden as this guild memo demonstrates:
If you want to continue to raid with [Guild], be a pleasant person to have in
a raid. Don’t forget the primary reason to be there is for the fun and
challenge, the loot is a bonus. By joining any of our raids, you accept our
looting policy and any disputes should be addressed in private chat after the
raid. If you have any issues during the raid, suck it up!
Most guilds attempt to establish a steady raid schedule during the week so members
can coordinate their life and make raids. However, for raid leaders the pressure of
showing up ready to deal with the demands of managing a large group of people is
enormous. The play experience starts to shift towards an obligation, as this female
player explained:
I mean I never have fun anymore. I used to. But it is so repetitive and the
drama. I’m not even a raid leader anymore - it was frustrating. People not
showing up on time and stuff. Drama before, during and after the raid. Peo-
ple not listening. So yea, it totally feels like work. Especially on my main.
One of the reasons I started leveling this shaman is to escape that. Yea,[she]
is fun.
7
Raid leaders are usually the designated Master Looters controlling the distribution of acquired
items.
Besides the emotional burnout, players reported that the time intensiveness of partici-
pating in end-game raiding (the third shift) interfered with their work (first shift) or
family obligations (second shift):
“I left [guild]. I just got a baby and was unable to make the raid times
regularly. Kind of sucks - I had a lot of friends in the guild, but I cannot play
with them, unless I make the raids. […] Pretty funny actually: I used to not
get sleep because of raiding. Now I haven’t slept since Wednesday [three
days] because of the baby”
In extreme cases, the demands of being a citizen of Azeroth is so overwhelming and
the grinding, labor and repetitiveness of playing becomes such a burden that players
actually leave the game. This is a further example of emotional labor for people leav-
ing and remaining in the game as well:
Mak: Anywho, I’m just not enjoying wow any more. I mean im sitting at the
bottom of SW [the abbreviation of a city] cannal (sic) for the past 20 mins
Fish [Guild Leader]: Sorry to hear that
Mak: It’s like absolutely 0 fun, so I’m leaving, not worth my money. The 19th
is my last day before my next pay period [when the players’ subscription
expire]. I’m sure you’ll all live.
Oghan : OMG
Oghan: NOOOOO
Mak: YEEES
Acker: What are you doing with your account?
Mak: Either keeping or selling.
Oghan: I buy it with ingame gold. Lol.
Mak: %~&} that! Cash only, no imaginary $*!^!
Fish: Don’t worry Mak, I will get you to have fun again.
Mak: doubtful.
Fish: If you are leaving, leave me ur accounts and ill lvl u to 80.
Mak: And it’s not even leveling, it’s just the whole game.
Elwis [logging on]: who is leaving?
Mak: me
Elwis: nooooooooo not my bestest best friend
Feron: Why is wow no longer fun Mak?
Mak: Quests are all the same, bosses are all the same, pvp is the same. It’s
just old.
Thus, the journey in a virtual world which is designed to have infinite possibilities
comes to end. No matter how many new continents, quests or raid dungeons are in-
troduced, the basic game mechanic is static. A player performs work to be able to
experience end-game content, work to be ready to raid, perform emotional labor to
mitigate conflict within the guild and during raids, than start it over again. Maybe
play continues with a different character, maybe on a different realm or even a differ-
ent game. Of course, one can always return: the characters are waiting to be resur-
rected through a monthly payment of $14.99.
5 Discussion and Conclusion
This paper demonstrates the inadequacy of analytic models that rely on a work/leisure
dichotomy within persistent multiuser online game environments. While players’
narratives and vocabularies might not always frame game participation in terms of
work, our ethnographic data and follow-up interviews revealed that the metaphor of
labor is, indeed, useful at understanding user experiences within virtual realms. While
previous research suggests that different game servers, especially in Europe (Taylor
[32]) show considerable variability, we did not find any significant cross-server dif-
ferences regarding labor and emotional work.
We showed that the leveling process is not only a source of fun, but also progres-
sion of work toward a final goal. Players join guilds during their leveling for help,
support and community. Yet membership in these groups is exceedingly unstable.
End-game guilds are organized more hierarchically. Guild raids demonstrate more
thorough regulation of labor; the process of control is key in successful groups. Guild
officers and raid leaders often possess the technical skill and game expertise to control
the play session with help from various add-ons to monitor individual performance,
which is broken down into particular tasks. Group play is controlled through textual
codes and unwritten customs: the length of the encounter, communication and breaks
are regulated. Players are expected to do their “homework” by spending considerable
time preparing for these gaming sessions.
Conflict within guilds and raid groups is inevitable, yet it is kept under control
through the process of emotional labor. Management of feelings is an essential part
of participating, which explains the taxing nature of online play. Emotional trans-
mutations are expected from the players to maintain solidarity and avoid conflict.
However, sometimes these transmutations fail causing frustration and frictions.
The symbiotic relationship of the mechanical structure of play and the emotional
investment of guild members ensures success. Either the breakdown of the work
process or the displaywork could lead to an abrupt end of the play session,
break-up of guilds or players leaving end-game content or the game environment
altogether.
We maintain that modern virtual realms are simultaneously play and work envi-
ronments: to make the distinction between the two is counter productive. The blurring
boundaries between work and play raise interesting questions not only about the na-
ture of gaming in the 21st century, but also about the nature of work and its changing
relationship to leisure. In his speculative nonfiction, Edward Castronova [33] pro-
poses that virtual worlds will in fact change the workplace: people would expect
smaller immediate rewards for their work, established authority structures would be
challenged and replaced by voluntary team effort. Obviously, these are ongoing proc-
esses in certain middle-class professions [34]. Yet, we are extremely skeptical that
participation in online virtual environments alone will pose a significant threat to
established stratification systems. Further research is required to fully understand the
underlying mechanisms.
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Human Rights and Private Ordering in Virtual Worlds
Olivier Oosterbaan∗
Abstract. This paper explores the application of human rights in (persistent)

virtual world environments. The paper begins with describing a number of ele-
ments that most virtual environments share and that are relevant for the applica-
tion of human rights in such a setting; and by describing in a general nature the
application of human rights between private individuals. The paper then contin-
ues by discussing the application in virtual environments of two universally
recognized human rights, namely freedom of expression, and freedom from dis-
crimination. As these specific rights are discussed, a number of more general
conclusions on the application of human rights in virtual environments are
drawn. The first general conclusion being that, because virtual worlds are pri-
vate environments, participants are subject to private ordering. The second gen-
eral conclusion being that participants and non-participants alike have to accept
at times that in-world expressions are to an extent private speech. The third
general conclusion is that, where participants represent themselves in-world,
other participants cannot assume that such in-world representation share the
characteristics of the human player; and that where virtual environments con-
tain game elements, participants and non-participants alike should not take eve-
rything that happens in the virtual environment at face value or literally, which
does however not amount to having to accept a higher level of infringement on
their rights for things that happen in such an environment.
1 Introduction
With the advent of online virtual environments in general, and online virtual worlds
and games in particular, the question arises in what way human rights need to be
respected in such environments. Is there, for example, a right not to be discriminated
against within such an environment on the basis of race or sexual orientation? And,
does the principle that everyone is free to express their views also apply within such
environments?1
∗
Partner, Create Law, Amsterdam. This paper is adopted from a 2006 contribution: “Bescher-
ming van mensenrechten in een virtuele spelomgeving. Een verkenning van nationaal- en
internationaal-rechtelijke aspecten” (Protection of Human Rights in a Virtual Game Environ-
ment), to the volume “Recht in een virtuele wereld: Juridische aspecten van Massive Multi-
player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG)” (Law in a Virtual World: Legal Aspects of
Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG’s)), A.R. Lodder, Ph.D., ed.
(Free University Amsterdam, School of Law, The Netherlands). With kind permission from
my co-authors J.V. van Balen (Lawyer at Versteeg, Wigman, Sprey, Amsterdam) and M.M.
Groothuis, Ph.D. (Leiden University, School of Law, The Netherlands). Any errors and om-
missions are the author’s.
1
While this paper takes The Netherlands as guiding jurisdiction, the principles discussed most
likely apply in other jurisdictions as well.
Human Rights and Private Ordering in Virtual Worlds 179
In addition to the question of the application of human rights principles in virtual

environments themselves, there is the question of the protection of human rights of
participants in real life (IRL). Can participants safely assume that their privacy will be
respected and that no personal information about themselves is made available in-
game? For example, if a participant in a virtual world unjustly publishes information
on a conviction of another participant, known by his or her real name, can the later
assume that such information will be promptly removed from the world? And can the
person who made the announcement–perhaps when claiming that the information
should remain available–invoke the right to freedom of expression?
All persistent multi-user environments share the characteristic that the “environ-
ment” exists on the servers of an operator, most often a private party. The environ-
ment continues to exist as long as the operator of the game keeps it in operation.
Some, but not all, environments share the characteristic that the participant takes on a
role, in a world that mimics our own or not, such as that of a wizard, perhaps a beauti-
ful young person or even a squirrel. Such environments often, if not always, contain
elements of play, including elements of representation, where the participant pretends
to be someone else than in real-life.
This paper looks at the question of whether human rights apply in a virtual (game)
environment, and if they do, to what extent. This paper first describes the type of
actions within virtual environments that are relevant from a human rights perspective.
This paper then continues with examining the extent to which two human rights in
particular –the right to freedom of expression; and the right to freedom from discrimi-
nation– are applicable within a virtual environment, especially by looking at the is-
sues that may arise when these two human rights intersect within (and sometimes
outside) the virtual environment. Particular emphasis is thereby put on environments
that are games (or that contain game elements). In connection with the above, this
paper will also address the question of provider liability in the context of ensuring the
protection of the aforementioned rights. Finally, this paper will address the question
whether a player (or third parties outside of the environment) has a right in rem for
human rights abuses against the operator of the virtual environment and/or other
participants.
2 Human Rights in Virtual Environments: Principles
2.1 Characteristics of Virtual Environments (and Worlds)
What actions within virtual environments are relevant from a human rights perspec-
tive? In order to answer that question two relevant characteristics that almost all vir-
tual worlds, if not all virtual environments, share, can be identified.
The first characteristic is the possibility to create an avatar (an online persona,
character, or representation). It is important to note here that each particular avatar is
commonly the representation of one particular person in real life. And, depending on
the particular setting, an avatar in a virtual environment may take a human or non-
human form. (Very much like in Hinduism.)
The second characteristic is the possibility for communication in a virtual
environment. This communication may be temporary, such as chat or voice commu-
nications, or less temporary, such as a forum, or in-game newspapers or magazines,
180 O. Oosterbaan
similar to the BBS (Bulletin Board System) of old. In addition, such communication
may be directed at one participant, or at a group or a number of participants in the
virtual environment. Finally, sometimes participants know who the actual person
(IRL) behind the avatar is, but usually they do not.
From a human rights perspective, these characteristics, or elements, are important:
with them, you can act and be present within a virtual environment in a way that is
relevant to such human rights as freedom of expression, and the right not to be dis-
criminated against: rights that come into play.
2.2 The Application of Human Rights in Virtual Worlds
The application of previously existing rights to new technologies has been, and is, a
topic of discussion in many jurisdictions. To take The Netherlands as an example, in the
mid-nineties, when the use of the Internet and the Web greatly increased, it was a topic
of debate among local Internautes and legal scholars alike whether the law in general
and human rights in particular applied in a virtual (or digital) environment. This discus-
sion would, for example, look at the question of whether putting a picture of a person
online without that person’s permission amounted to a violation of that person’s privacy
rights or not? Today, more than ten years later, there is little discussion about whether
the law, and in particular human rights, also applies in a virtual environment. There is
no online free-for-all.2 The legal debate at the national and international level is now
more about how legal standards, including human rights, should be interpreted when
applied to online environments; and on whether additional standards –specifically di-
rected at the online environment sphere– are possibly required.3
The doctrine of horizontal effect of human rights is important in connection with
the legal relationship between a virtual environment operator and the real-life partici-
pants. To take again The Netherlands as an example, human rights in this jurisdiction
have only direct effect in the relationship between governments and citizens (vertical
effect). Although there is no direct effect in relations between citizens, the norms and
standards contained within human rights texts and treaties may play a role in the col-
oring-in of open legal (tort) norms and terms such as the duty to act in good faith and
the duty of care. In a court of law a judge may, when weighing the competing inter-
ests of the litigant parties, take such an interest to be the protection –for one, or for
each litigant– of a human right, resulting in an indirect horizontal effect of human
rights between private parties.4
2
See generally, on the rights of players, Raph Koster, Declaring the Rights of Players, 2000,
available at http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/playerrights.shtml, in which article Koster calls
for a kind of “benevolent dictator” to protect the natural rights of players in a game environment.
3 See generally, on the protection of human rights in virtual environments, the UN Declaration
of Principles for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), 12 December 2003,
Document WSIS-03/GENEAVA/DOC/4-E, http://www.itu.int/wsis/documents/index.html
(visited 1 March 2009); Declaration on Human Rights and the Rule of Law in the Information
Society of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe (CM(2005)56 final, 13 May
2005): https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id=849061 (visited 1 March 2009).
4
See generally, on these competing interests, Jack Balkin, “Virtual Liberty: Freedom to Design
and Freedom to Play in Virtual Worlds”, 90 VIRG. LR 2043 (2004), where Balkin dubs these
competing interests “freedom to play” and “freedom to design”.
In addition, when evaluating expressions or behavior in a virtual environment, two

elements should be taken into account. First, there is the element of such an environ-
ment more often than not being a “confined space”: as a walled garden it is not public
but not always entirely private either. Because of this, virtual environments are not the
same as websites, including publicly accessible forums and social networks, and the
corresponding standard of care is possibly lower than that for the “general-purpose”
Web.5 (This includes those services often labeled as the 3D Web.) Second, there is the
element of play: if it regards a virtual game environment then the elements of play
should be taken into account. Not everything that is said and done in such an envi-
ronment should be taken too seriously. Again, this separates some virtual environ-
ments from websites, including publicly accessible forums and social networks. As a
result of these, the standard of care for closed or semi-open, and/or game environ-
ments may be different than in real life.6
As regards the constitutional rights analysis, there are similarities between an
online virtual environment and a play or a game of sports. In a play certain characters
may use expressions that IRL would be considered discriminatory. However, within
the framework of the play such an expression is not lightly taken to be discriminatory
and/or attributed to the actor in question. This both because the speech act is per-
formed in the context of a play, and because the actor portrays a (fictional) character.
Similarly, a sports and games situation: within the confines of the sports pitch, differ-
ent standards of care apply between the players for the duration of the game than after
the game and outside of the pitch. One could argue that in the different context of a
play, or in the setting of a game of sports, the boundaries of what is permissible and
what isn’t are temporarily enlarged, or in any case redrawn. More or different things
are allowed, but not everything. Where exactly these new boundaries are set in a play,
a sports game, or a virtual environment is different for each case.7
5
See also, ECHR, Perrin v. United Kingdom 18 October 2005, European Human Rights Cases
2006, ep. 2, 7 February 2006, pp. 112-119, with a note by Groothuis, where the Court, in con-
nection with a case regarding a convicted pornographer, in addition to confirming that Article
10 ECHR also offers protection for acts of expression (pictures in that case) on the Internet,
also seemed to make a distinction between different forms of online communication, whereas
Perrin had put online pictures on a publicly available website (as opposed to a website with
limited access). Consider here also the fact that many online environments only use the
(TCP/IP layer of the) Internet for server-to-client communication but are not as publicly
available as a website.
6
See differently, Tal Zarsky, Privacy and Data Collection in Virtual Worlds, in STATE OF PLAY
– LAW, GAMES AND VIRTUAL WORLDS (Jack M. Blakin and Beth Simone Noveck eds., NYU
Press, 2006), pp. 217-223, at p. 222, where Zarsky argues that whereas such closed gardens
and “playful” settings enhance privacy concerns in virtual environments, the legal standards
applied to Terms of Use agreements governing virtual environment should be more protective
compared to those for ISPs and other Internet applications.
7
See generally, Edward Castranova, The Right to Play, 49 N. Y. L. SCH. L. REV. 185 (2004), pp.
185-210, 2004, at pp. 188-193, where Castranova, quoting Johan Huizinga, draws a distinc-
tion between play within the “Magic Circle” and common behavior outside of the Magic Cir-
cle, before arguing for codifying the boundaries of the Magic Circle. In my opinion, insofar
Castranova argues for a binary choice of “game” vs. “non-game”, this is a choice that cannot
be made, and does not need to be made.
182 O. Oosterbaan
In conclusion, within virtual (game) environments, the duty to act in good faith and
the duty of care are colored in, amongst others, by the indirect horizontal effect of
human rights. Where, in this sense, human rights should be respected within a virtual
environment, the question remains how and to what extent a participant in such envi-
ronment –and possibly other individuals and groups outside of the virtual environ-
ment– can uphold such rights, either by acting against another participant in the vir-
tual world, or against it’s operator. In the following paragraphs, the possibilities for
legal actions are discussed for two human rights that often play a role in virtual envi-
ronments: the freedom of expression, and the right not to be discriminated against.
(And, for the avoidance of doubt, it always regards the direct protection of the human
rights of natural persons; their on-line personae have no rights.)
3 Freedom of Expression Applied to Virtual Worlds
3.1 In-Game Expressions: Some Examples
Within virtual environments there are a number of options to express one’s view via
one’s in-world (or in-game) character. Especially in environments with a visual inter-
face, the ways are myriad. Chat or voice communication is one, but one may also put
up images in a virtual environment (cf. to a BBS posting with an attachment) or pub-
lish an in-world newsletter. If one participant finds such expression illegal, he or she
may complain to the moderator (or Game Master in the case of a game) as the first
point of contact, acting on behalf of the operator of the environment.8 The moderator
can then proceed to remove the expression and/or deny the player in question access
to the world, either temporarily or permanently.
3.2 Normative Framework
I believe that, in deciding whether to remove a particular expression, and possibly a

player, from the virtual world, an operator (and, initially, the moderator), has to meet
the standard of care that normally applies to all private actions.9 Because of the
above-mentioned coloring-in of the standard of care by human rights norms, it is the
operator who has to weigh the importance of freedom of expression of the participant,
as expressed through his or her in-world persona, against the interest of the party or
parties that the operator is seeking to protect, and against the private interests of the
8 Automated filtering through blacklists is disregarded here, although a point may be made that
this amounts to preliminary censorship. However, the same counter-point made elsewhere in
the paper applies here as well: the virtual environment is a private one.
9 The liability exemptions for ISPs (mere conduit, caching and hosting) from the EU eCom-
merce Directive (Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8
June 2000 on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic
commerce, in the Internal Market, OJ L 178, 17.7.2000) most likely do not apply here,
whereas it is uncertain that the service that the operator provides is an ‘information society
service’ (“any service normally provided for remuneration, at a distance, by electronic means
and at the individual request of a recipient of services”) under the Directive since it regards
information that the participant wants to provide through the infrastructure of the operator,
like a telephone service almost.
operator. The later interest can be, for example, the interest to protect the good opera-
tion or atmosphere of the world, which may include an interest to act against in-game
discrimination.
3.3 Possible Actions
If the operator does not correctly apply the above-mentioned standard of care, the
removal of (an expression of) a participant from the world, the participant whose
freedom of expression within the environment is limited may possibly have an action
(based on tort) against the operator. What is then the (unwritten) standard of care that
the operator must apply here? The obligation not to limit unnecessarily another per-
son’s freedom of expression follows from the (indirect) horizontal effect of the human
right of freedom of expression. This standard is likely set less high than IRL, because
of the closed nature of the virtual world, and because of the participant, more often
than not, having accepted terms of use. Consequently, because of the closed nature of
a virtual environment it is possible that more is allowed in-world than IRL. However,
the converse may also hold true: if the virtual environment knows a setting more
utopian than ours, the standard may be that less is allowed.
In addition, where the participant has agreed to Terms of Use, these terms often
contain certain provisions on what type of behavior is and is not allowed. These
terms, and any restrictions they may contain, naturally vary from environment to
environment. It is entirely possible that a set of Terms of Use contains no provisions
on limiting expressions within the environment. If this is the case, it can be argued
that a participant would not expect a limitation of his or her expression to be done
lightheartedly. It bears notice here that many Terms of Use contain catch-all provi-
sions that allow the operator a wide discretionary power vis-à-vis the participant,
including the power to remove certain in-world expressions and the power to correct
certain behavior, for example by removing the participant from the world.10
Because of the above, and because of the relatively weak (indirect) effect of human
rights in a “horizontal” relationship between private parties, it can be argued that the
operator has a large discretionary space in taking the decision whether or not to limit
the freedom of expression of a virtual environment participant.11
If a participant would begin a tort action against the operator, on the basis of the
operator acting as censor, a Dutch court can be expected to balance the interests of the
participant to express his or her views freely against the interests of the operator to
10
For example, the User Agreement of Sims Online from Electronic Arts (http://www.ea.com/
official/thesims/thesimsonline/us/nai/info.html) contains the provision that: “[Electronic
Arts] reserves the right to terminate the Sims Online service after 90 days notice.” Whether
such terms are enforceable under consumer law is a question that falls outside the scope of
this paper.
11
See also, the 2008 Human rights guidelines for online games providers of the Council of
Europe (H/Inf (2008) 8) in which the Council remarks, in connection with removing gamer-
generated content, that “Acting without first checking and verifying may be considered as an
interference with legal content and with the rights and freedoms of those gamers creating and
communicating such content, in particular the right to freedom of expression and informa-
tion”, pp. 6-7.
184 O. Oosterbaan
run the environment.12 This balancing takes as a background the applicable standards
of care for the operator. My assessment is that this balancing by the court –because of
the relatively weak requirement on the operator alone, and the unique characteristics
of a virtual environment that make the indirect horizontal effect weaker still— will
not easily fall in favor of the participant. Consequently, I consider the likelihood of
success of a tort action by a participant in a virtual world against an operator for cause
of the operator limiting the in-world freedom of expression, to be very small.
4 Freedom from Discrimination as Applied to Virtual

Environments
4.1 In-Game Discrimination: Some Examples
The most obvious way to be discriminated against in a virtual environment, is by a

discriminatory expression of another player.13 However, it can also occur in other
ways, as the following examples illustrate.
For example, back in early 2006, in the MMORPG World of Warcraft Chinese-
speaking players were discriminated against, as (groups of) North American players
saw all Chinese-speaking players as gold farmers, who corrupted the game and their
in-game experience.14 The discriminating behavior by the English-speaking players to
the non-English speaking players consisted notably of making discriminatory com-
ments and of not allowing the non-English speakers to join existing groups (guilds).
In this case, discrimination on the basis of language resulted in discriminatory acts
and exclusion from a group.
To give another example of discrimination in a game. In the MMORPG A Tale in
the Desert –which is set in the Egypt of old– a number of players had created a NPC
(Non-Player Character, a kind of chatbot or intelligent agent) that did not sell in-
game items to female characters.15 An interesting detail is that it was the developers
12
See also, ECHR, Appleby and others v. United Kingdom. 6 May 2003, where Appleby and
others protested against them not being able to express their views inside of a privately
owned shopping mall. In Appleby, the Court, in an obiter dictum, considered that: “While it
is true that demographic, social, economic and technological developments are changing the
ways in which people move around and come into contact with each other, The Court is not
persuaded that this requires the automatic creation of rights of entry to private property
[…].” Where […] the bar on access to property has the effect of preventing any effective ex-
ercise of freedom of expression or it can be said that the essence of the right has been de-
stroyed, the Court would not exclude that a positive obligation could arise for the State to
protect the enjoyment of the Convention rights by regulating property rights.” (Par. 47.) The
property rights concerned in our case would be those of the operator to its infrastructure.
13
For the avoidance of doubt, it is the discrimination of a natural person that is discussed here;
discrimination of an online character (avatar) is not possible.
14
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=62493; see also http://www.pressbox.co.uk/
detailed/Internet/Discrimination_Surfaces_in_World_of_Warcraft_49114.html.
15
See, for example, Daniel Terdiman, Wired, 3 November 2004, http://www.wired.com/news/
games/0,2101,65532,00.html.
themselves who had made the NPC.16 An example of what normally amounts to dis-
criminatory behavior being acceptable since it is in a virtual world and follows the
story-line of such world? Also striking here was that the Terms of Use of A Tale in
the Dessert allow this kind of behavior, or at least do not prohibit it.
4.2 Concept Definition
When is there in-world discrimination? Before answering this question, it should be

noted that within those virtual environments that allow participants to choose a visual
representation of themselves, participants do not always choose a representation (or
avatar) that shares the same characteristics as themselves. Young, male players can
choose an older female avatar, and vice versa. If there are elements of play, it may be
attractive and interesting to role-play as someone else. This may mean that what in-
world looks like discrimination, isn’t IRL.17 Conversely, it can also happen that a
participant, without the intent to discriminate directly against another participant in
the same environment, on the basis of a characteristic that the discriminated partici-
pant does not share with his or her in-world persona. Although such a situation is
interesting from a sociological point of view, it is less so from a legal point of view:
after all, the actual participant should be considered here, regardless of the character-
istics of his or her in-world.
It is also interesting to note here that discrimination within a virtual environment
may have an outside effect IRL. The breadth and scope of this effect will be different
between different virtual environments, depending on, for example, the accessibility
and persistent nature of the information in question.
4.3 Possible Actions
If we confine ourselves to the participants (or third parties outside of the virtual envi-
ronment) who are discriminated against: who can they take action against? First, there
is a possible action against the discriminating participant. Second, the participant may
have an action against the operator of the world if the operator –on request or of own
volition– does not promptly and adequately remove a discriminatory expression or
discriminating participant from the world. Third, the discriminated participant may
have an action against the operator to retrieve name and address records for the dis-
criminating participant, if such data is not already known to the requesting participant
by other means, such as the participant him- or herself having previously shared such
information in-world.18
The first mentioned action, although relevant for society, is not any different be-
tween the context of a virtual environment and any other case of discrimination be-
tween citizens IRL.
What about the second action mentioned? For an action against the operator, where
the participant asks for an expression to be removed from the environment the
16
Id. “But the trader was actually a non-player character controlled by the developers to inten-
tionally start a controversy in a virtual world they feel is sometimes too polite.”
17
Under Dutch penal law, for example, intent on discrimination of a specific individual is not
an element. (See Articles 90quater and 137c Dutch Penal Code.).
18
The latter action is not further discussed in this paper.
186 O. Oosterbaan
question is whether a given expression is of an illegal or manifestly unlawful nature;

an assessment that is never 100% sure. If an expression is clearly unlawful, and the
operator does not move promptly to remove it, the operator can be held liable. The
assessment by the operator of an expression being either lawful or illegal is very fact-
dependent, and includes an assessment of the importance of free expression for the
participant who made the contentious expression. If a participant’s request to remove
information is not honored by the operator, and it comes to a court case, the Dutch
court will make the same type of assessment as the operator made before, containing
the same elements, and performing the same balancing analysis.
Similarly, if a request is made to remove the discriminating participant from the
world, for example in the case of repeated behavior. Here also, the operator, and ulti-
mately the courts, will have to balance the importance of freedom from discrimination
against the other competing interests, of the discriminating participants, other partici-
pants, the operator itself, and society outside of the virtual environment.
5 Conclusion
In conclusion, human rights do apply in virtual environments but their normally al-
ready limited effect on legal relationships between private parties is further lessened
by mainly three important characteristics of virtual environments. First, such
environments are private worlds, where they are almost always operated by private
parties, and there is an amount of private ordering that occurs. Second, such environ-
ments are semi-private worlds where what happens in the world becomes not always
(widely) known outside of the world. Third, elements of play within such environ-
ments may mean that participants are not always who they seem they are, and that
actions from participants should not always be taken literal.
Investigating the Concept of Consumers as
Producers in Virtual Worlds:
Looking through Social, Technical, Economic,
and Legal Lenses
Holger M. Kienle1 , Andreas Lober2 , Crina A. Vasiliu3 , and Hausi A. Müller1

1
University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
{kienle,hausi}@cs.uvic.ca
2
RAe Schulte Riesenkampff, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
alober@schulte-lawyers.de
3
University of Victoria MBA Alumni, Victoria, BC, Canada
crina.vasiliu@alumni.uvic.ca
Abstract. Virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life

enable consumers as producers, that is users can choose to be passive
consumers of content, active producers of content, or both. Consumers
as producers poses unique challenges and opportunities for both opera-
tors and users of virtual worlds. While the degrees of freedom for user-
generated content differ depending on the world, instances of consumers
as producers can be found in many virtual worlds. In this paper we char-
acterize consumers as producers with the help of four “lenses”—social,
technical, economic, and legal—and use the lenses to discuss implications
for operators and users. These lenses provide a complementary analysis
of consumers as producers from different angels and shows that an un-
derstanding of it requires a holistic approach.
Keywords: consumers as producers, prosumer, crowdsourcing, virtual

worlds, emergent behavior, architecture.
1 Introduction
Creators of virtual worlds are facing many technical challenges (e.g., scalability,
data persistence, consistency, latency, content protection, or security). But be-
sides addressing the underlying technology and infrastructure to operate a virtual
world successfully, business, policy, and legal challenges are equally important for
success. Examples of important issues that need to be addressed are customer re-
lationship management, Web portals for game-supporting functions (e.g., player
matching), revenue models, or terms of service (ToS) agreements. Besides these
out-of-world issues, there are also in-world issues to address such as offering a rich
and immersive experience that keeps users engaged, game physics, trading mech-
anisms, and rules of the virtual economy. Within this environment, consumers as
producers is another critical aspect that needs to be factored in by operators.

This paper explores the consequences of consumers as producers in the context

of virtual worlds. In essence, consumers as producers means that users are part of
a virtual environment—including a virtual society and economy—that gives them
the freedom to be producers, consumers, or both. In the following, we denote the
concept and phenomenon of consumers as producers as CasP and use it in the sin-
gular. This paper argues that CasP has a significant impact on a virtual world—its
society, its economy, its technical infrastructure, and the legal constrains that ap-
ply. While CasP adds complexity to a virtual world, it also enriches the world in
many (unexpected) dimensions. There are operators of virtual worlds that try to
severely limit and constrain the idea of CasP, perhaps because of added complex-
ity, legal repercussions, and emergent behavior that does not allow to predict the
world’s evolution. Other operators of virtual worlds have embraced CasP, trying
to provide an environment that furthers the benefits of both users and operators.
Regardless of the operator’s approach, the impact of CasP on the virtual world
cannot be ignored. This paper characterizes CasP with the help of four lenses (i.e.,
social, technical, economic, and legal) and then uses the lenses to discuss implica-
tions for the operators and users of virtual worlds.
In the following, we restrict our discussion to metaverse-like worlds and mas-
sive multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Both have in common that they enable
multiple users to interact and collaborate in a persistent computer-generated
environment. MMOGs emphasize game characteristics (e.g., leveling, competi-
tion, strategy, or winning). In contrast, metaverses have no explicit goal. User-
generation of in-world content is much more pronounced in metaverses than
MMOGs.
We discuss virtual worlds from the perspective of different stakeholders. These
stakeholders are users and operators, but also third parties such as legislation,
law enforcement, and policy makers. When speaking of the operator of a virtual
world, we mean the entity that offers the service and provides access to the virtual
world. The user has access to the virtual world via an account and interacts in
the world with his or her avatar.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the concept of
CasP in the context of virtual worlds. Sections 3–6 explore CasP with the social,
technical, economic, and legal lenses, respectively. Section 7 discusses overarching
issues that affect CasP. Section 8 closes the paper with our conclusions.
2 Consumers as Producers
A central concept that transforms the Internet is CasP [1]. It most visibly drives
social network sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter [2]. A common
characteristic of social network sites is that there is an emerging culture shaped
by social interactions of its members in a virtual environment. Members in this
culture are not only passive consumers of information, but actively engaged in
producing information themselves. Besides the Internet, virtual worlds provide
an infrastructure that fosters—or at least enables—CasP. In a report of the
Federal Trade Commission on a major hearing in November 2006, CasP was
Consumers as Producers in Virtual Worlds 189
identified “as one of the most important developments of the past few years,
and one which will likely dominate the coming decade” [3].
CasP is in stark contrast to the established model of mass media, which is
based on the notion of relatively few but large, commercial producers who sell
content to a mass audience. In this model, content is offered for consumption but
there is no incentive for the producer to encourage or allow the consumers to cre-
ate derivative works (i.e., remixing). Since content is created and distributed by
a few, production and distribution is relatively centralized and easily controlled
[4]. In contrast, CasP is highly decentralized and uncontrolled, and embedded in
the Internet’s borderless communication infrastructure. The concept of CasP is
addressed in different ways by different researchers using different nomenclature.
Kazman and Chen use the term crowdsourcing [5], Pearce talks about emergent
authorship [4], Reuveni says users are conducers [6], Toffler coined the term
prosumer (i.e., a contraction of producer–consumer) [7], etc. In the following
discussion we will stick to CasP.
The following sections survey the concept of CasP and explore it with four
distinct lenses: technical, social, economic, and legal. We argue that each of these
perspectives severely impacts virtual worlds—more precisely, the stakeholders of
virtual words. In the following discussion we mostly focus on virtual worlds and
two major stakeholders, users and operators.
3 Social and Cultural Lens

The social and cultural lens focuses on virtual worlds as persistent social spaces.
They enable personal communication and interactions among participants via
avatars. Besides operating on a personal level and supporting social relations
and networks, a virtual world constitutes a society with its own culture(s).1
Consequently, virtual worlds can be studied and looked at from the perspective
of ethnography.
Pearce has done this with a group of players of Uru, a MMOG based on
Myst [8]. In Uru, a player belongs to a certain hood (similar to a guild), which
has a player as mayor. The founding of a hood can be seen as the beginning
of a society. This is apparent from the mayor of one hood who after more
and more players joined her hood “realised [she] would have to become orga-
nized and set some ground rules” [8, p. 89]. Uru’s culture is defined by the
(emergent) story of the game, artifacts within the game (e.g., each hood has a
central fountain where avatars can gather), special language, and common char-
acteristics of the players (e.g., they “tended to value intelligence and problem
solving” [8, p. 81]). After Uru was shut down, players of the hood decided to
migrate their society and its culture to other virtual worlds—most ended up
settling in There.com but also in Second Life. This meant that central pieces of
1
For this discussion, we define culture as a set of shared attitudes, believes, values,
customs, behaviors, and artifacts that characterizes a group of people. A society is
a social infrastructure inhabited by people that exhibits patterns of relationships
between people that share a distinctive culture.
the Uru culture were re-created in There.com and Second Life (e.g., a commu-
nity center with a central fountain and Uru-style architectural elements). Uru’s
lead artist became one of the top developers of There.com and Uru’s members
founded the University of There. As a result, Uru’s players “made major contri-
butions to the There.com community, and eventually became fully integrated,
while still maintaining their group identity” [8, p. 107]. However, in the be-
ginning Uru members had to keep up with incidents of griefing by established
users.
The user’s avatar represents an individual within the virtual world’s society.
Users typically have the option to determine the looks of an avatar and to con-
tinuously change it. This is a rudimentary example of the concept of CasP. Uru is
an example of a virtual world that offers basic customization by selection from
a limited number of options to determine hair styles, facial features, clothing
items, etc. Uru has no class system and avatar choices do not influence skills.
Hence, the user creates the avatar solely based on the desired looks. Interest-
ingly, Pearce has found that the evolution of an avatar is not only the result
of the user’s individual desire, but instead that the formation of avatar identity
“evolved out of an emergent process of social feedback” [8, p. 69].
When Uru’s players looked for a suitable new world, one important goal was to
replicate avatars as faithfully as possible. Furthermore, expressiveness of avatar
animation was seen as important. In contrast to Uru, There.com and Second Life
enable more advanced avatar design. This made it possible to create Uru-style
clothing. Another example is the Relto in Uru, which is an avatar’s home base
in the form of a small adobe cottage. In Uru, the user cannot design the Relto,
but in There.com and Second Life users created their own interpretations of the
original Relto. Ondrejka observes that users of virtual worlds have the tendency
to specialize [9, p. 92]. Some users act as project leaders, while other specialize
in aspects of artifact construction (e.g., textures or scripting). As a result, if the
virtual world allows it, such as in Second Life, larger-scale construction is often
an in-world social activity involving intense collaboration [8, p. 155ff].
The case of Uru illustrates well that a virtual society enables CasP at several
levels. This is most obvious in the users’ creation of avatars, clothing, Relto and
other (cultural) virtual artifacts. Not so obvious is that production happens via
exploration of the virtual world and via interaction with avatars and objects
within the world. Pearce argues that the role of the operator of a virtual world
is to create “context” rather than content [4]. This is perhaps most apparent
in virtual worlds like There.com and Second Life that provide context in the
form of “world rules” (e.g., the physics of virtual objects), but leave it to the
users to populate the content and to explore, interact, and utilize the rules
and architecture of the world. Ondrejka argues that operators should leverage
the “desire of people in general to express themselves through creation and
customization. . . . People want to be perceived as creative by customizing their
surroundings. People want to have their moments on the stage. In many cases,
it seems that users are just waiting for access to the right tools” [9]. This holds
for both in-world and out-of-world content.
4 Technical Lens
The technical lens emphasizes challenges to meet the functional and non-
functional requirements of virtual worlds. CasP has a negative impact on some of
these requirements in the sense that it increases the technical difficulties to satisfy
them. Furthermore, the design, implementation, and maintenance of a virtual
world requires different approaches compared to the traditional approach of en-
gineering software systems [10]. Software development for crowdsourced systems
that enable CasP is characterized by a bifurcated architecture (consisting of a rel-
atively stable kernel and a not-so stable periphery), and needs to accommodate
“perpetual beta” and “always on” [5].
Humphreys points out that in computer games “players have developed new
objects to be imported into the game, new ‘skins’ that make characters or ob-
jects in the game look different, new AI (artificial intelligence) characters to play
against inside a game, and even new games using game engines from existing
games” [11]. To allow CasP on a larger scale, a technical infrastructure needs to
be in place that supports the effective creation of content by users.2 The Sims
was perhaps the first mass-market game that released tools to users so that they
could easily create content (in this case, domestic goods such as furniture). As a
result, 80–90% of the content has been created by players [9] [11]. Machinima is
an example of out-of-world content produced by users, which leverages the game
engine itself, supporting tools (e.g., level editor), and possibly game-related con-
tent such as backgrounds and characters. Machinima is typically sanctioned or
even encouraged by the game operator. Second Life supports content generation
with in-world tools and scripting capabilities with the Linden Script Language
(SLS). SLS is an event-driven language that can be used to control behavior of
objects and avatars. Building of new objects is done with atomistic construction
(i.e., building of larger and more complex creations out of basic building blocks)
[9]. In Second Life, the basic elements—called prims as in primitives—are geo-
metric shapes such as box, tube, sphere, or torus.
The functional requirements for a virtual world primarily address the fea-
tures of the world. For example, an important decision—that greatly affects the
design—is whether the world uses bitmap or vector graphics. Another important
requirement is the viewpoint and representation of geometric data in 2D, 2 1/2
D, or 3 D. Other functional requirements address the in-world experience such
as whether objects are solid or not (implemented with collision detection) and
whether objects adhere to physical laws or not (implemented with the physics
engine). Non-functional requirements of virtual worlds address quality attributes
such as availability, scalability, persistence, and privacy [12]. That these require-
ments are difficult to meet is illustrated by recurring server outages, scripting
vulnerabilities, inconsistencies, duping, and content loss in popular virtual worlds
2
If the operator does not provide an infrastructure for users, they will work around
this limitation as best as they can. This is illustrated by mods (e.g., Counter-Strike,
based on Half-Life) [11], and elaborate strategies to decorate homes in Ultima Online
(e.g., building a piano out of items such as cloth, desk, and chessboard) [9].
[13] [14]. To scale virtual worlds to larger user bases and many in-world objects,
techniques such as shards (e.g., World of Warcraft) and tiling (e.g., Second Life)
are used.
Functional and non-functional requirements determine the extent to which
the concept of CasP is possible. A fixed synthetic world offers no or little oppor-
tunities for user-generated content. In contrast, a co-constructed word that is
based on vector graphics and scriptable behavior such as Second Life gives users
the freedom to create content in the form of virtual objects, textures/skins, and
sophisticated object behavior.
CasP directly impacts scalability. While fixed synthetic worlds can handle sev-
eral thousands of users per server, Second Life can accommodate only about 40
users per server [12]. For fixed synthetic worlds most game content (i.e., object
geometries, textures, animation attributes, collision parameters, and placement
in the world [14]) can be pre-installed on the client; in co-created worlds most
content data needs to be downloaded from the server to the client, significantly
increasing the network load. As a result, co-created worlds typically exhibit less
detailed graphics and smaller view peripheries. Comparing World of Warcraft
and Second Life, Symborski found that Second Life required more than 20 times
the bandwidth load [14]. Even though data can be cached, since the content
is dynamic—users can continually create and modify objects—it needs to be
checked for staleness and accordingly updated. This problem is further exacer-
bated by the fact that “in practice, user-created objects are massively clustered
together,” which can lead to incomplete rendering and inconsistencies in the
world, causing strange avatar-world interactions [14] [15].
Another challenge of CasP is that content generated by the user is not op-
timized for the technical infrastructure of the virtual world because users have
neither the information nor the expertise to do so. In fixed synthetic worlds con-
tent can be tested and optimized by the operator so that it “looks good and is
rendered at interactive rates” [12].
5 Economic and Business Lens
The economic lens looks at virtual worlds as a form of (many-to-many) e-

commerce and explores issues such as value generation via production of in-
formation goods. Another economic aspect is the business model of the virtual
world. MMOGs often used to have a subscription-based business model that re-
quires users to pay a monthly fee. This approach is attractive for the operator
because it mitigates uncertainty with a more predictable revenue stream. Nowa-
days, operators increasingly offer free play coupled with item sales. Leveraging
CasP requires the operator to come up with new or enhanced business models
that are different from established ones, which typically place the consumer as a
passive recipient of goods or services at the end of the value chain. For example,
Kazman and Chen argue that crowdsourced system need to embrace service-
orientation, which requires “a shift on the part of businesses, to see consumers
. . . as co-creators of value” [5]. This requires a shift “from thinking about value
as something produced and sold to thinking about value as something co-created

with the customer.”
Swire emphasizes the economic aspect of CasP when observing that “users
can produce high-quality information goods from home, and sell through the
global distribution system of the Internet” [16]. There are many examples of
such information goods ranging from open source software to multi-media in
blogs and social network sites. For virtual worlds, users can create or add value to
virtual assets and sell or trade them either through in-world channels (in-context
economy) or out-of-world via eBay (out-of-context economy) [17]. In MMOGs,
users can deal with virtual assets (e.g., weapons) or level-up their avatar and
then sell it. The latter is an example of the transfer of in-world content via
real-world money. From an economic perspective, it is a rational choice for time-
constrained users to advance their characters through real-world money rather
than time-consuming leveling.
Commerce is significantly enhanced if the virtual world has an economic model
involving virtual money and users that can own virtual property [18] [19]. Virtual
money (e.g., Second Life’s Linden Dollars or Entropia Universe’s PED) is real
in the sense that they can be exchanged for real money and vice-versa. With a
virtual economy in place users can derive revenue through business activities. In
Second Life, a user has claimed to have earned $1 million USD with virtual estate
dealings. If the virtual economy is paired with user-generated content such as in
Second Life, commerce is enriched further. To give a few examples, in Second Life
users can create virtual clothing, jewelery, tattoos, and hair styles for avatars and
offer them for sale in virtual shops. The same holds for furniture, vehicles, and
buildings. This form of virtual economy works because just as in real life users
are willing to indulge in shopping and consumerism. As in real life, users are
willing to pay for virtual objects that they want but do not have the expertise,
time, or interest to produce themselves. Lehdonvirta has identified a number
of drivers that make users purchase virtual items: functional attributes (e.g.,
performance), hedonistic attributes (e.g., customizability), and social attributes
(e.g., branding) [20].
Operators can define the rules of the virtual economy to ensure that they
make (virtual) money from it. For example, Second Life did tax users for the
virtual objects that they created. The rationale for this was that objects in the
virtual world take real-world resources to process, store, and transmit. However,
this scheme resulted in very high taxes that effectively prevented users from
creating on a large scale (e.g., experiences such as gardens) [21]. User frustration
over these economic constraints (culminating in a “tax revolt”) prompted Second
Life to change these rules. Under the new scheme, the amount of owned land
effectively limits the content that can be created (in terms of the number of
prims). Second Life auctions off virtual land for virtual money. The value of
virtual land is determined by virtual world architecture. Before Second Life
abandoned telehubs, proximity to a telehub increased the price of land because
the expectation was that they would become commercial centers populated with
many avatars. A virtual economy that gives users the opportunity to make real
money has another consequence: “users would want to own their creations” [9].
This issue is discussed in the next lens under virtual property.
6 Legal and Policy Lens

This lens explores virtual worlds from a legal and regulatory perspective. Consid-
erations are, for instance, applying existing law to virtual worlds, development
of legal theories in response to virtual worlds, and possibly dedicated laws to
regulate virtual worlds.
Almost all legal issues that exist in real life are potentially applicable to virtual
worlds [22]. The key question is how to map virtual incidents to applicable law:
killing a human is not the same as killing an avatar, so the latter is not being
considered murder (even though there may be other repercussion of such an
act depending on the virtual world). If the virtual world allows (real-time) user
interactions (e.g., avatar movements in 3D or voice chat) there is increasing
possibility of harassment, assault, and libel that resemble real-world scenarios.
If the virtual world has an economic model involving virtual money and users
that can own virtual property there is the problem of taxation, fraud and money
laundering [23] [18] [19].
When users create content, this content may be illegal or inappropriate (e.g.,
offensive) [24]. In terms of illegal content, intellectual property (IP) is the most
critical issue from the perspective of CasP. Generally, content accessible in vir-
tual worlds may infringe on (out-of-world) copyrights and trademarks [25]. Op-
erators have to provide an infrastructure where infringements can be reported
and affected content can be taken down. Violation of IP rights can have serious
consequences for the operators. The MMOG City of Heroes was sued by Marvel
because it allegedly enabled copyright and trademark infringement by its users
[25]. Dougherty and Lastowka say that a lesson for operators may be that “to
avoid litigation, [they] should err on the side of caution when deciding whether
to empower participants with tools for creative expression” [25].
If users create content in a virtual world, either the operator or the user may
own the copyright. Game operators often claim copyright of users’ in-world cre-
ations or allow user-created content only for noncommercial use (e.g., EA’s The
Sims) [11]. Auran’s Trainz is a rare example of a game that allows users to own
and commercialize their content [11]. Similarly, Second Life allows users to retain
their IP rights (or license them under Creative Commons). When users retain
IP of their creations, certain challenges have to be faced when these creations
become part of the virtual world. For instance, if a user sells one of her virtual
creations, certain rights attached to it may have to be transferred or licensed to
the new owner; and if users retain the copyright of their avatars, what about
screenshots with a commercial interest that are depicting them? Bartle believes
that “IP laws are currently a pitfall for VW developers because they are inad-
equately stated” [26]. For CasP this legal uncertainty “may already be deemed
chilling of creativity” [27].
Another critical issue that interacts with IP is virtual property: do virtual
items constitute property and, if so, who owns that property? These questions are
as yet unresolved.3 Lastowka and Hunter have argued convincingly from the legal
perspective that virtual items could be treated like real property [18]. Bartle has
raised concerns about the impact of virtual property from the perspective of the
game developers [17]. A key legal consideration is that virtual property resembles
real property in its rivalrousness, persistence, and interconnectivity [23]. More
precisely, virtual property has these attributes if the virtual world’s architecture
chooses to do so, but this is typically indeed the case. Not surprising, there are
court cases that have treated virtual property as real property. Operators have
argued that since they own the IP of a virtual item, they should be the ones to
control it (e.g., forbidding users to sell these item). On the other hand, IP law
already recognizes the distinction between the copy of an item (e.g., a book) and
the copyright on that item (e.g., the copyright in the book)—and this distinction
directly translates to virtual items [23, p. 1632]
Besides the laws that directly regulate virtual worlds, there is also the con-
tract between the world’s operator and the users of that world in the form of ToS
and end-user license agreement (EULA). Operators typically try to keep control
over the virtual world to the extent that supports their business model. For ex-
ample, World of Warcraft’s ToS claims ownership of player accounts and since
users have to agree to “no ownership rights in account” the gateway to their
virtual assets can be rendered inaccessible “for any reason or for no reason.”
On the other hand, operators may allow certain forms of user-generated con-
tent and make that explicit in their contracts. World of Warcraft allows users
to create machinima under certain conditions (e.g., non-commercial and “T”
rated). Contracts between the operator and users come with legal uncertainty.
An unbalanced policy that is not freely bargained and that puts users at a clear
disadvantage increases the operator’s risk that courts will find unconscionable
conduct—and as a result may refuse to (partially) enforce the contract [28].
Consumer protection law is another area that impacts virtual worlds [16].
Under certain conditions CasP may have to comply with consumer protection
laws. This has an impact, for instance, on advertising. Conversely, under certain
conditions users may be treated as consumers under the law and may claim
consumer-style protections. For example, Bartle points out that if an operator
is selling virtual items and these items are treated as virtual property then users
“can expect the same kind of security that they get under regular consumer
protection laws” [26].
7 Discussion
Table 1 exposes the tradeoffs (i.e., opportunities and risks) of CasP for both users
and operators. For the social lens, CasP enables users to shape their own culture
3
When we speak of property, we do not necessarily apply it strictly in a legal sense (as
the notion of property depends on the legal system and its philosophical underpin-
nings), but rather use it to refer to a legal position that, inter alia, grants its holder
an exclusive position vis-à-vis third parties, including the right to use, to transfer,
and to commercially exploit the “property.”
(e.g., via creating artifacts or in-world games), which increases the user’s sense
of belonging to the virtual world and helps the operator to retain customers.
On the downside, user-generated content can prompt griefing or other forms of
harassment since users expose their culture and values via their creations. As a
result, operators may find themselves in a mediating position between different
user groups (even though presumably they do not want to be involved) [8, p. 102].
For the technical lens, since user-generated content requires skills such as
scripting and graphics design, users can distinguish themselves through their
technical and artistic expertise. Operators can establish technological leadership
via the supporting infrastructure that is required for user-generated content.
On the other hand, this technical infrastructure is more complex and based
on novel technology, increasing the risk of security vulnerabilities. Also, this
infrastructure requires more computing resources on both the client and server
side (cf. Section 4).
For the economic lens, the user has the incentive of making money from the
virtual world, but this also comes with the risk of losing money by circumstances
that are beyond the user’s control (e.g., because of changes made by the operator
to the virtual economy). The operator can participate in the virtual economy
(e.g., via “taxation”) and can derive revenue from it (cf. Section 6). However,
there is the risk that the virtual economy collapses and with it the operator. Since
users are creating most of the content, operators have to spend less resources on
content creation themselves.
For the legal lens, treating virtual items as real property strengthens the
position of a user against other users (e.g., in the case of theft) or the operator
(e.g., in the case of content loss). Operators can also try to claim ownership
of virtual items created by users (based on the ToS). Acknowledging virtual
property reinforces the legality of practices such as gold farming and third-party
trading platforms. Thus, virtual property does not necessarily align with the
interests of users and operators. Generally, the current situation is characterized
by great legal uncertainty, posing a risk for both user and operator (even though
both parties appear to be relatively unconcerned about this).
We believe that the identified lenses are a useful vehicle to understand and
analyze the concept of CasP and its implications better. While scholars have
Table 1. Opportunities and risks of CasP for users and operators
opportunities/benefits risks/drawbacks
Lens
user operator user operator
social co-creator of better user griefing dealing with
emerging culture loyalty/retention offending content
technical technical/artistic technological complexity and vulnerability of
expertise leadership technical infrastructure
economic financial gain taxation, less devaluation of economic insta-
(e.g., asset sales) in-house content assets bility or collapse
legal claim to ownership and IP rights legal uncertainty (e.g., virtual
of virtual assets property, consumer protection, IP)
already analyzed CasP from individual lenses, they have not addressed CasP
holistically. In our discussion we have focused on each lens individually in order
to sharpen the discussion. However, it should be clear that there are interactions
among the lenses. A good example to illustrate this is virtual world architecture,
which is explained in the next section.
7.1 Virtual World Architecture

Lessig has introduced architecture into the discussion of cyberlaw [29].4 The
architecture of the real world is the “physical world as we find it.” The architec-
ture’s constraints regulate behavior in the world (e.g., you cannot communicate
through a brick wall). In a virtual world, the architecture of the world can be
defined arbitrarily via its “code” (i.e., its implementation in software). For exam-
ple, the architecture of a virtual world could mimic the constraints of a real-world
brick wall, or not. A virtual world could define that avatars can communicate
and walk through brick walls, or not. There are many architectural choices that
the designers of virtual worlds can make: avatar constraints, cause-and-effect
behavior, interaction and communication mechanisms, economic structure, and
so on.
While the designers of the virtual world have in principle unlimited choices
how to define the architecture, in practice these choices are constrained by the
four lenses. For example, the social lens argues for an architecture where users
feel at home and encourages them to engage in an emergent society. Ondrejka
says that “Second Life chose to mirror the real world in many important aspects
in order to provide a place that felt familiar and comfortable, while granting
freedoms not possible in the real world” [30]. The architecture of a virtual world
has a significant impact on CasP. Thus, the operator can define the architecture
in such a way that it meets the desired characteristics. For example, Second Life
places little restrictions on the kinds of objects that can be constructed because
the basic building blocks are prims. Thus, users can create all kinds of buildings.
If the basic building blocks were not prims but pieces of buildings that could
only be combined according to certain rules then the virtual world would impose
some form of “building codes” (e.g., Ultima Online). Analogously, the looks of
an avatar can be more open (e.g., Second Life) or more restrictive (e.g., City of
Heroes) [24]. Putting restrictions on user-generated content may be needed to
provide a consistent (user) experience or to limit legal liabilities.
7.2 Emergent Behavior

While the operator can control the architecture, emergent behavior is outside
of the operator’s control. Ondrejka defines emergent behavior as follows:
4
Besides architecture, Lessig also introduces law, social norms, and markets as reg-
ulators (or modalities) of behavior in cyberspace. Thus, Lessig’s regulators can be
seen as lenses to explore regulation in cyberspace, while this paper introduces lenses
to explore CasP in virtual worlds. While Lessig’s regulators are similar to our lenses,
they are not identical.
“Emergent behavior occurs when a set of rules interact in interesting and un-
expected ways to allow experimenters and innovators to create truly new cre-
ations” [9]. These “new creations” are typically not forseen by the operators of
the virtual world. While the operators define the architecture, the creations that
emerge from the rules and constraints of the architecture are not foreseeable.
Besides in-world emergent behavior there can be also an out-of-world emer-
gent economy. Emergent behavior can range from dropped items as decoration
for a wedding ceremony (Lineage) and the exploitation of a collision-detection
bug for hide-and-seek (Uru), to Buggy Polo (There.com) and D’ni Olympics
(Uru) [8] [31].
7.3 Operators as Gods
The fact that operators have total control over the in-world architecture means
that they can be seen as “gods” of the virtual world. The risks that users of
virtual worlds are facing have the following analogy: “In the real world, those
who make investments in a country expose themselves to uniquely ‘sovereign’
risks because of the danger that the government might alter the laws under
which they claim to hold assets” [32].
The more users have invested in virtual assets and have come to depend on
certain architectural features, the more likely that they will sue if they believe
that a change in behavior constitutes a misconduct on the side of the operator. In
this respect, operators are constrained by considerations of keeping users happy
and of legal implications. As a consequence, for the operator evolution of the
world becomes much more difficult. The basic problem is that any change—no
matter how insignificant it may appear—can have an unexpected impact on the
virtual world [17]. As a result, the value of a virtual item may decline or a virtual
weapon may be less effective.
7.4 Factors Impacting Consumers as Producers
To analyze further the concept of CasP, we are presenting the key issues discussed
so far and their interdependencies with the help of a sign-graph diagram as shown
in Figure 1. The diagram identifies the key variables or concepts of the system
under discussion and likely effects of changes (i.e., making interventions to the
system). The arrows between the variables are labeled with a plus or minus sign,
indication whether a change in the variable at the tail strengthens or dampens
the variable at the arrowhead.
The concept for CasP is given at the top of Figure 1. The extent to which
a certain virtual world enables CasP depends on many variables, but whether
they have a negative or positive impact on CasP is not readily apparent. For
example, are the kinds of users that the world attracts more likely to generate
content than others and under which conditions? Would a different set of prims
in Second Life change the amount of content produced and what gets produced?
Has Second Life’s policy of “patent peace” in its ToS an impact on content
consumers as producers +
−
+ + emergent behavior
technical simplicty
virtual property −
operators as gods
−
+
architectural evolution
Fig. 1. Interdependencies of CasP in virtual worlds
production?5 While there are many such variables that cannot be taken into
account, there are several key concepts that expose important dependencies.
These are discussed in the following:
−
CasP −→ technical simplicity: CasP increases technical complexity and costs
because of issues such as scalability (cf. Section 4). Furthermore, the operator
has to invest in a technical infrastructure (e.g., tools) that encourages user-
generated content.
+
CasP ←→ emergent behavior: There are many examples how CasP fosters
emergent behavior. Conversely, one can also argue that any form of emergent
behavior constitutes an instance of the concept of CasP. Thus, there is a
positive feedback loop between both concepts, which is consistent with the
observation “that ‘emergence happens,’ regardless of the world type” [31].
+
CasP −→ virtual property: Once users are producing content, many of them
have the desire to own their creations. This is especially true if content cre-
ation happens within a virtual economy. Hence, CasP pushes for virtual
property and there are virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) that are accommo-
dating this demand. However, even if the operator tries to discourage virtual
property (which is typically the case in MMOGs), there is a pressure towards
it because virtual assets can be converted to real money (cf. Section 6).
−
CasP −→ architectural evolution: Architectural evolution of virtual worlds
is complicated by CasP because any change of the architecture may invali-
date or alter the users’ content. For example, changing the specification of a
prim or removing one in Second Life would have unpredictable effects on the
5
Ginsu of Second Life says that “the patent peace provisions of our terms of service
are there to protect innovation, not to prevent anyone’s profit. We believe that
these terms will lead to better content, lower costs for everyone involved, and more
innovation and variety and experimentation and economic growth,” https://lists.
secondlife.com/pipermail/educators/2006-September/002634.html.
virtual world. The more user-generated content and the more important that
this content is for the experience of the virtual world, the more constrained
is the operator.
−
virtual property −→ operators as gods: Bartle argues that a consequence
of virtual property is that users are demanding from operators that their
property retains its value; this in turn “puts severe—perhaps impossible—
constraints on them” and thus diminishes their god-like status [26].
+
operators as gods −→ architectural evolution: If operators can make de-
cisions without any constraints imposed on them, they can act as gods when
it comes to the evolution of the virtual world. In practice, operators are con-
strained by legal considerations and regard for the user base. An example of
such as constrain is virtual property as discussed above. Note that virtual
property (indirectly) exacerbates the evolution problem because a change in
the architecture will invariably have an impact on the value of virtual as-
sets. Any change in the architecture will predictable make a number of users
unhappy, possibly prompting them to seek compensation via the courts.
The above dependencies can be seen as working hypotheses that need to be

further refined and researched (e.g., based on qualitative or quantitative studies).
Furthermore, additional key concepts could be identified and added to the sign-
graph diagram.
8 Conclusions and Future Work
This paper has addressed the concept of consumers as producers (CasP) with the
help of four lenses. The social lens perceives virtual worlds as a society that has
its cultures; the technical lens addresses how to design, implement and operate
a virtual world; the economic lens approaches virtual worlds as many-to-many
e-commerce that deals with virtual assets; and the legal lens encompasses laws
that potentially affect virtual worlds.
CasP is a potentially disruptive phenomenon that transforms how users and
operators perceive virtual worlds. It can be beneficially leveraged by operators
provided that they have the right strategy and business model. For users, it
can significantly enhance the experience of a virtual world, leading to a vibrant
society with rich emergent behavior. Thus, CasP can be a win-win situation for
both operators and users.
Each lens provides a complementary view of CasP. Operators should take each
lens into account when analyzing the impact of CasP on their virtual world. Op-
erators have to understand that “the more user-created content is not always the
better” [27] because it comes with risks as well as opportunities. For example,
there is significant uncertainty in the legal and economic area—and the interac-
tions between the two. Furthermore, user-generated content can be leveraged for
griefing and harassment. Thus, operators will have to carefully assess the rami-
fications of business models and virtual world architectures that aim to leverage
CasP.
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Author Index
Almeida, Virgı́lio 44 Lin, Hui 1

Anantaram, C. 91 Lober, Andreas 79, 187
Lopes, Cristina V. 106
Brunetti, Gino 135 Lukacs, Andras 165
Chen, Bin 1
Chen, Irene Rui 151 Machado, Felipe 44
Mast, Fred W. 68
Djorgovski, S.George 29 McMillan, Steve 29
Müller, Hausi A. 79, 187
Embrick, David G. 165
Eppler, Martin J. 121 Oosterbaan, Olivier 178
Farr, Will 29
Paradiso, Joseph A. 12
Gavrielidou, Elena 60
Ghosh, Hiranmay 91 Santos, Matheus 44
Graham, Matthew J. 29 Schmeil, Andreas 121
Guedes, Dorgival 44 Servidio, Rocco 135
Sharma, Geetika 91
Henckel, Amy 106
Huang, Fengru 1 Vasiliu, Crina A. 79, 187
Hut, Piet 29 Vesperini, Enrico 29
Kienle, Holger M. 79, 187
Knop, Rob 29 Wang, Xiangyu 151
Weibel, David 68
Lamers, Maarten H. 60 Wissmath, Bartholomäus 68
Lifton, Joshua 12 Wright, Talmadge 165

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Lecture Notes of the Institute

for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009943510

CR Subject Classification (1998): K.8, I.2.1, K.4.2, K.3, J.4, I.3.7

• “Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The

General Conference Chair

General Conference Vice Chair

Technical Program Chair

Local Arrangements Chair

FaVE 2009 – Track 1

Dual Reality: Merging the Real and Virtual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientiﬁc Research Platform:

FaVE 2009 – Track 2

Landmarks and Time-Pressure in Virtual Navigation: Towards

The Eﬀects of Virtual Weather on Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

FaVE 2009 – Track 3

The Role of Semantics in Next-Generation Online Virtual World-Based

StellarSim: A Plug-In Architecture for Scientiﬁc Visualizations in

FaVE 2009 – Track 4

Conceptual Design Scheme for Virtual Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Usability Issues of an Augmented Virtuality Environment for Design . . . 151

FaVE 2009 – Track 5

Human Rights and Private Ordering in Virtual Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

Investigating the Concept of Consumers as Producers in Virtual

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Fengru Huang1, Hui Lin1, and Bin Chen2

Abstract. Geographic environment is a combination of natural and cultural en-

Keywords: Virtual Environment, Virtual Geography, Experimental Geography,

2 Background and Research Progress of VGE

2.1 What Is VGE?

1, Integrated management and interoperation on geo-models and GIS data;

2.2 Why VGE Rising?

2.3 Related Work

2.4 Research Contents and Key Issues of VGE

In contrast to current data-centered GIS, a VGE is a human-centered environment. A

3 Revolution of Geography Research Methods and Geographic

Field Survey and Mapping

Distributed Collaborative 3D Virtual GIS

Geographic Models and

Fig. 1. Process from map and GIS to VGE

4 Development of Virtual Geography

4.1 VGE Extends Geographic Environment in the Real World

4.2 Virtual Geography

5 Development of Experimental Geography

5.1 Experimental Geography

Experiment is an important feature as well as a symbol of development of modern

Traditional methods used in Experimental Geography include field experiments

5.2 Virtual Geographic Experiments for Experimental Geography

5.3 VGE as a Virtual Geographic Experiment Platform

Virtual geographic experiment

Fig. 2. VGE extends the research methods of Experimental Geography

6 Discussion and Conclusion

Joshua Lifton and Joseph A. Paradiso

MIT Media Lab

Abstract. This paper proposes the convergence of sensor networks and

Keywords: dual reality, virtual worlds, sensor network.

Fig. 1. An environmental taxonomy as viewed on the real-virtual axis (left). Sensor

2.1 Self-expression in Virtual Worlds

2.2 The Vacancy Problem

S.G. Djorgovski1,∗, P. Hut2,, S. McMillan3,, E. Vesperini3,*,