Posts Relating To: research

Do you Collaborate in Second Life? Interviewees Needed

As part of my ongo­ing PhD pro­ject, I’m look­ing to inter­view around a dozen or so people about how they use Second Life to col­lab­or­ate with oth­ers on pro­jects. I’m using a very loose defin­i­tion of col­lab­or­a­tion here, which could include things like gen­eral meet­ings, work­ing on products, organ­ising events, land admin­is­tra­tion, present­a­tions, per­form­ances, even

Virtual World Design Guidelines Courtesy of Microsoft

Between 1995 and 2001, Microsoft developed and oper­ated it’s own social vir­tual world. Named V-Chat, the ser­vice allowed users to cre­ate their own text-based, 2D, or 3D envir­on­ments in which they could chat and inter­act with other users. In it’s six years of act­ive ser­vice, V-Chat saw two major iter­a­tions, an act­ive end-user com­munity num­ber­ing

Second Life as a Product of the Mind

Back in the 1970s, towards the end of the research flurry where com­mu­nic­a­tion sys­tems were being heav­ily stud­ied by both the Brit­ish Post Office and the US Gov­ern­ment, Short and col­leagues (1977) made refer­rence to an idea they termed social pres­ence. Their the­ory was that all forms of com­mu­nic­a­tion var­ied in the degree to which

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 love writ­ing these things — and I have every inten­tion on car­ry­ing on with them — but for a blog that was ori­gin­ally meant to be about research it’s kind of

My Lab — The Toeda Research Centre

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

No Translations for Cisco Telepresence

It’s times like this when I real­ise that maybe I’m actu­ally get­ting some­where with my research. Last year Cisco announced that they were work­ing on an auto­mated trans­la­tion ser­vice for their Tele­p­res­ence video con­fer­en­cing product. The ser­vice could appar­ently tran­scribe a user’s speech, accur­ately trans­late it, and then ‘read’ the trans­la­tion to the user’s remote

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 I’m doing.
So I’m Aaron, and I’m a UK research stu­dent study­ing for a PhD in the UK. My pro­ject has one main, and extremely broad, object­ive — how can people who aren’t