a-res.info

One of the most important things when it comes to doing Second Life research is having somewhere to do it (d'uh XD). I guess interviews could feasibly be done in public places, or at the humble abodes of your participants, but more experimental stuff really needs its own dedicated lab. So for this post I'm going to be showing off mine!

So allow me to introduce you to the thriving hub of experimentation that is, The Toeda Research Centre, named after the sim it's located in.

So that's the outside of my lab. I say lab, it's filled with all kinds of junk. It's kind of a home slash lab. The main building is the product of months of tweaking - it used to be a fairly oriental-ish looking building made of megaprims - I think the whole building only contributed something like 15 prims to my prim count originally. I made the structure more complicated each time I increased the size of my parcel, adding in columns, support beams, etc as the prim count permitted.

Here's the interior, and the place where I conduct my interviews. Note the little device by the chair, it records local chat (after asking permission from everyone in recording range). It's a pretty handy device to have in the case of crashing. Although to be honest, in one-to-one situations - instant messages work best as you can see when the other person is typing.

This is the observation lab - or at least that's what I call it. In reality it's the place where I run the experiments, observation or not. It looks more like some kind of storage building or something from the outside.

Here's an interior shot, although it's a bit dark and gloomy. As you can see, it's really plain and dull. It's supposed to be like that. Interesting things are distracting and could potentially affect the results - the idea behind a boring lab is that people focus on the task at hand.

So there you have it. A brief walk through of my lab, complete with pictures. Sure it's not the best thing in the world, but it fills my virtual research needs just fine!

(Hopefully) Related posts:

1. Welcome to my research blog Hello and wel­come to my blog, post num­ber one — oblig­at­ory object­ives post com­plete with a vague over­view of who I am and what...
2. Virtual World Research Up until now, most of my blog posts have been fairly opin­ion­ated errr… reflec­tions on vari­ous things, events, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I...