Social Life in Virtual Worlds: Structure and Interaction in

Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on …, 2009

… : Presence and interaction in shared virtual …, 2002

In this chapter, I will give an overview of some central issues in research on shared virtual environments (VEs) -including "presence", "copresence", communication, and small and large group dynamics -across a range of virtual reality (VR) technologies and different conditions under which they are used. I will discuss different studies of the interplay between technological systems and their social implications, and how sociological insights about interaction in the real world can be brought to bear on interaction in VEs. Finally, I will argue that making links between different areas of research can lead to a better understanding of social interaction in VEs.

2001

This paper reports from an experimental study of cooperative work in a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) with sixty test subjects. A method from social psychology, interaction process analysis (IPA), was used for analyzing group dynamics within the CVE in relation to three communicative modes: text-chat, voice, and video conferencing. The study investigated how the communicative mode influenced the quality of the social interaction and how cooperative work in a CVE could be analyzed by using categories of social interaction. It was found that the frequencies of utterances in the voice and video conferencing conditions were significantly larger than in the text-chat condition. The dialogue of the text-chat condition was found to be more task oriented than the dialogues of the voice and video conferencing condition. The social psychological method used was not developed for use within CVE:s, but it was found to work well since the scope of the IPA method is broad and applicable to virtually any small group.

Small Group Research, 2011

This article provides a review of previously published studies on virtual environments (VEs), focusing especially on empirical articles on social and group phenomena in VEs and their methodological and theoretical trends. Virtual environments can be defined as communication systems in which interactants share the same three-dimensional digital space and can navigate, manipulate objects, and interact with one another via avatars. When examining the methodological and theoretical choices of these studies, four trends could be identified that characterize group studies on virtual environments: 1) testing the applicability of real-life, social behavior norms in VEs, 2) a lack of work group studies using VEs, 3) the micro-level treatment of social and groups and 4) a lack of covering theory. Finally, propositions for future research are presented.

What is the virtual? I would offer three complementary definitions. First, the term indicates an immaterial context of interaction, a kind of intangible architecture that supports and organizes interactions. Second, the virtual evokes an organized field of relations that people navigate using one or two senses while suspending or separating the other senses, bracketing them in a different stream of awareness. Third, the virtual can be understood as a system that permits spatially dispersed participants to interact in a way that would otherwise require proximity and face-to-face interaction. Defined in this way, the virtual has a long history, reaching back to the origins of writing and speech itself.

2013

This is a comparative study of two virtual environments, which can be used in distance education: Virtual World (VW) and Video Conference (VC). Previous studies have examined these two environments based on Social Presence Theory. Using media theories, the current study investigates the fundamental differences between these two synchronous environments. From the theoretical analysis it is shown that VW, contrary to VC, creates a rather “compact” environment for its users and it can support “dynamic” learning activities. These two media properties have to be explored in further research with qualitative and quantitative methods.

2014

This article describes a study that aims to understand the collaboration processes in a discussion forum of a social network created for the professional development of Portuguese speaking teachers. Murphy’s (2004) conceptual framework was chosen to analyse the learning processes underlying online asynchronous interactions that occur following through six progressive stages from social presence and ending to the production of shared artefacts. The instrument used for the analysis has proved to be effective for recognising online collaboration. Results show that the social presence is essential to support a virtual community because it helps to remove the impersonality of such environments in which face-to-face contacts are almost non-existent. However, it has not been possible to check for high levels of collaboration as reported in the literature. Collaboration has still a long way to go and its promotion depends on the engagement of participants in the process of transcending indi...

Proceedings of CVE, 1998

In this paper we explore the question of whether collaborative virtual environments can be regarded as social systems. One criteria of social systems is the presence of social conventions which serve as a basis for common communication. We conducted empirical research in three different on-line environments in order to identify explicit and implicit social conventions. We found evidence that a number of social conventions exist and that the nature of their expression was different depending on the media and functionality available in the environment.

AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research (SPIR) , 2018

The paper contributes a preliminary outline on how immersive experiences in social VR can be both theorized and empirically examined. Its objective is to understand the complexities, specificities and problems posed when conducting such a research, ultimately aiming at learning from the process in order to design a more systematic and comprehensive design study of social interaction in multi-user immersive virtual environments (VEs).

Applied Psycholinguistics, 2000

In the early 1990s, Lynn Cherny spent much of her time in the MUD – not mired in wet earth, but actively exploring “Multi-User Dungeons.” These “fictional universes with a focus on role-playing,” as they are defined in the Introduction, enable groups of Internet-connected individuals to assemble in cyberspace, communicating by way of sequentially typed text. Later, as a doctoral student in linguistics at Stanford, Cherny decided to study ethnographically – that is, from the perspective of one methodically and dispassionately observing a different race – the expressive practices of those habitually using this strange new modality.