The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds

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The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual
Worlds

• Presented by
• Yeshwanth Boppana
• Sowmya Nagubadi

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overview

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

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Introduction

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

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SL and WOW

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

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Contin

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

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Virtual Laboratory Experiments

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

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Auction House in WOW
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Second Life
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Observational Social and Economic Science

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

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

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Computer and Information Science

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

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

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Human Challenges

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

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Critical Views

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

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• When there are still network and technical
  issues(latency) related to online gaming in
  virtual worlds, can we predict a perfect virtual
  world at the door step of every user? There was
  only a question raised about it but no
  suggestions were given.
• The main focus of paper was on the credits of VW
  and its potential of research in future. An
  alarming thing is when it is involving so many
  users and other constraints, a potential risk is
  also present. There is no mention regarding it.
  (Example if organizations are holding meetings
  in VW isnt there a risk of confidential data
  leak?)

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Critical questions

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

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Questions?