Personally, I’m not convinced that the video calling capabilities of the iPhone will be a huge hit. It’s not hurting anyone by being there, but to some extent it feels like it’s checking a box on a feature list. I mean realistically, why would you make a video call when it’s so much easier and natural to make a phone call? You don’t have to hold your phone out at an awkward position (which is at arms length if you want to avoid an unflattering angle), you don’t have to worry about what you look like or where you are, and you don’t have to worry about whether or not the other person can hear you. Certainly there are situations in which video can be extremely useful, group bonding is a good example, serious negotiations another, but why would you use a mobile phone to do any of those? Can you imagine doing that on a train — keeping your phone held out in-front of you for an hour long meeting? Maybe we’ll see a range of helmets released with an iPhone caddy on the end of a snooker cue that’s fixed to the top. We’ll call it iHelmetTime and make millions! That is, until iNeckbraceTime come out with a competing product that includes built-in Bluetooth and cup holder.

So I think video conferencing on the iPhone is going to be a no-go. It strikes me as one of those things that people will use a couple of times when their friends and then never use again. But as for the rest of the iPhone 4? Nom. Want.

What it has…

Aesthetics

The new client looks absolutely marvelous. Yup I know that sounds like a fairly unimportant thing to talk about, but actually it isn’t. How pleasing a GUI is, is far more important than you might think. I recall that there was a paper published last year demonstrating how high aesthetics could actually enhance performance when using interfaces with low usability. The new interface is much more attractive — it’s clean and clear, and more inline with the ‘HUD’ and ‘Helvetica’ style trends.

Sidebar

I actually mentioned a sidebar in my post at the beginning of the year. Nope I wasn’t one of the lucky few who got to try out the alphas in exchange for an NDA (MS and HP give me that privilege ;) ). I’d like to say ‘great minds think a-like’ but I guess docking all the windows is kind of a logical step to make. Dragging windows all over the place was a huge pain in the ass in the old viewer, so it’s not something I miss. I’d love to see the chat windows move onto it too.

Chat

For me the biggest improvements have been made with the chat interface. I love the icons that appear next to each users’ contribution, as well as the icon tabs on the bottom of the screen (although these are sometimes too small to work out who’s it is). It’s also great to be able to chat with a group and see a list of online users in the chat window — no more wondering who did and didn’t get the message! I’m not sure why it was felt necessary to move the ‘is typing’ notification to the top of the window however. That’s a little counter-intuitive, and I dont know of any other chat programs that display that kind of message so far from the input box. That’s some pretty major saccades that are being forced on the user there. An ‘is typing’ notification would also work great under the user’s name for local chat, it’s so annoying when you type over people — and I hate relying on that puppet typewriter pose.

Active Media

I’m guessing that’s what it’s called. To be honest I haven’t watched any of the videos so I don’t know. Sorry but we tech guys NEVER watch instructional information. It’s like sacrilege! Anyway, this new ability to display any kind of web media on a prim instead of a texture is pretty nifty. It’s going to open up huge possibilities for the virtual world, everything from flash gaming and videos to Google Docs and interactive whiteboards can be shown on them. Here’s betting that multiplayer flash games become very popular! Unfortunately my viewer crashed when there was too much flash in use… so I’m hoping this doesn’t become a new griefer tool.

What it doesn’t have…

Context Awareness

There isn’t any, except for context aware help. Back when I was working at Hewlett-Packard Labs, I was based with a group who’s project was centered entirely around context awareness, making interfaces and information adapt on the basis of where you were and what you were doing. Most of what they did involved GPS, and displaying relevant media based on where you were. Effectively they were doing augmented reality before it was augmented reality, just before they had the power to superimpose stuff over camera streams. The main issue with GPS however, is that it’s only a reliable indicator of the physical location of the sensor, not the crucial ever-changing meaningful stuff — what makes sense to display at one time isn’t relevant at others. Second Life is in a superb position in that the viewer knows almost everything about a location — no matter what place you’re talking about, it knows who’s there, what’s there, and where that is. It could provide an amazing contextually aware interface. How about a tab that displays reviews pulled from XStreet on the basis of nearby objects? Or status updates pulled from Avatars United for nearby avs? In fact you could open it up completely and pull all kinds of things off the web — flickr pics, tweets, blog posts, machinima — sites that link to that SLurl. Second Life could provide a stream of contextually relevant information that would be totally impossible in the real world. They could even craft a whole ad-platform around it if they wanted to (in-exchange for free premium subscriptions one would hope!).

Land Owner Interface Customisation

I wrote about this in an earlier post where I talked about Microsoft’s experience with virtual worlds, and I still think it would be a great idea. In fact I even suggested that it would work best via a sidebar — so now that there is one there’s no excuse! Basically it would function as an extended parcel profile, except the owner could specify extra things that would get displayed directly in the visitor’s sidebar. I’m talking about things such as a blog feed, flickr photos, promotional stuff, info that would normally get sent out by those automatic notecard givers. That kind of thing. If you were visiting a roleplaying sim for example, a back story and sim rules might be displayed — or a live event might display a program. In essence it’s pretty similar to context awareness, but it’s entirely human defined.

The User Experience

Old Experienced Users

Experienced users are probably going to be the ones having the hardest time adjusting to the new viewer, simply because they’ll have established routines catered around the old viewer. Expect to hear lots of complaints. Truth is, there isn’t anything majorly wrong with the new interface. As a psychologist I’d say they’re rationalising issues that stem from fighting against the autonomous motor plans that they’d normally use to complete tasks. Now that these well-rehearsed plans are redundant, the user has to try and fight against the temptation to look in particular places, move the cursor to certain parts of the screen etc. As this is all done automatically, the user doesn’t have conscious awareness that there old motor plans are the problem and so blame those aspects that they are aware of (i.e. the interface). Eventually this will get easier, and users will get used to the new interface (in other words, the autonomous plans will be adjusted or overwritten).

New Users

It’s hard to speak from the viewpoint of a new user, that’s pretty much half the point of why we have cognitive ergonomics. It’s like looking at those visual illusions, where at first they look like a mess of dots, but suddenly you see the hidden image, at which point, no matter how hard you try, you can’t go back to seeing the mess of dots that you used to see. Users (including developers) cannot experience a piece of software from anyone’s perspective other than their own. Having said that, it seems to me that the new interface is fairly clean and clear. Certainly there are less buttons and options (this isn’t actually an important aspect at all, and in fact a greater number of options can give the illusion of greater control which may sometimes be a good thing), but the amount of button presses needed to access them doesn’t seem to be any less. I think it’s the aesthetics which will be the thing that gives new users that helping hand, like I mentioned before — better aesthetics leads to better performance.

Will it attract New Users?

Some. I don’t think it’s really the interface that’s the problem when it comes to attracting new users. I mean we’ve all tried to convince RL friends and family to use Second Life at some point or another — and although they may have said — ‘it seems too hard’ — how many of them have ever actually looked at the interface close enough to make a judgement like that? The real issue is, what Second Life can offer — and with the ability to use new forms of media in-world, it does offer a few new things. But it doesn’t offer many. Much of what it does offer, could already be achieved by having a browser window open simultaneously. I think that showing users what is actually possible in SL is the key, and that comes from marketing, not a new client. Personally I feel that the only user surges that might occur will be short-term users exploring it because they saw it on some website. The same kind of users that would install a new Twitter client because it was featured on Techcrunch, tweet a couple of times, and then never use it again. Haha I’m pessimistic I know, but like I said, it’s marketing and better informing potential users that will ultimately improve SL’s userbase.

So…

So all in all, a great upgrade so far, with the potential to be fantastic, but I remain to be convinced that it’s going to result in huge numbers of new users.

Normally I don’t talk about my research on my blog other than to advertise for participants, but in this instance I’ll make an exception. Recently I’ve been conducting a few interviews on how people use Second Life to work together, they’re still in the pilot stage, but the results I’ve been getting are really interesting. One issue that keeps coming up time and time again however is the lack of networking. People in Second Life who want to work with others are finding it hard to make that initial contact, they’re struggling to introduce themselves — especially to people more respected than themselves, and they’re needing to rely on external services such as Plurk and Twitter to do it. Rather than just an out of the blue IM, these external services allow a more sociable and effective approach to making contact. Linden must have surely been aware of this as the acquisition of a social networking site like Avatars United is a logical remedy to that problem.

Unfortunately this raises another issue. In cognitive ergonomics, there’s what is known as the sticking-plaster approach to solving problems  - it’s a quick, cheap, and easy solution — where you simply identify the problem, devise a new subsystem that solves it, and then whack it on top. Simple. The downside is, with each plaster you apply you run the risk of problems occurring in that too — so what do you do? Stick another plaster on top of that one, and so they start to pile up, creating a behemoth of spiralling and unmanageable complexity. The alternative is to rip out the system, or an aspect thereof, and redesign it from scratch. Obviously, this means that these solutions take longer, are more expensive, and can cause some short term disruptions for users who may need to adjust their work habits — but in return you get to keep the system simple and end up with an extremely effective long-term solution. With the possible exception of the promised 2.0 client, LL relies heavily on the former method, and the acquisition of AU is one such example. And just like we’d expect, this sticking plaster is already requiring some of its own — avatar verification, data loss, a constant stream of ‘XXXXX has united with YYYYY’ which completely spams out the informative content are just a few of the cracks forming.

Although I’m in no doubt that purchasing Avatars United was carried out with the interest of users in mind, it doesn’t seem like the wisest of moves to make. I’ve already outlined how some existing aspects of Second Life could be redesigned in order to support a wider variety of relationships as well as enable networking opportunities, and I’m sure the folks at Linden could probably come up with a fair few of their own — it’s just surprising that they’ve applied such a complex solution to a far simpler problem. It will be interesting to see how this story unfolds.

So why doesn’t Second Life have an address book? To be honest I just can’t work it out. Take a look at another medium for staying in touch with others — Twitter. You have the option of following whoever you want, and they have the option of following you back. You get a stream of contextual information, sometimes even location — and there’s not a single instance of ‘Will you be my friend?’ in sight. Even real-life doesn’t have these problems — you don’t end a meeting offering a business card only if the other person hands you their’s back. And they certainly wouldn’t turn it down by smacking it out of your hand yelling ‘YOUR FRIENDSHIP REQUEST HAS BEEN DENIED’ and then suddenly disappearing.

My point here, is that the kinds of contacts you can make in Second Life are limited by the way the contact system is designed. Unless you’re friends by mutual agreement — you’re nothing. I bet most people have been in the situation where they’ve been wondering if it would be appropriate to ask for friendship. Do you ask your SL landlord for friendship? How about clients, event organisers, or the person who wrote a custom script for you? Maybe even the person offering customer support for a product you use regularly, an in-world therapist, or ummm… a purveyor of adult pleasures that you happen to be fond of? Even more confusing are calling cards. I’ve been in Second Life for around a year, and I’ve never once received a calling card that wasn’t automatically exchanged. In fact, I’m pretty sure most people don’t even know that they’re there — it’s just one of those default inventory folders that you skim past and don’t look in because it’s probably full of noob junk.

Calling cards could offer some sort of solution if they were treated more prominently. I bet if there was a calling card tab alongside the friends and groups lists, people would use them. Actually, why don’t we have two? Treat it similarly to Twitter and have a list of calling cards you own, and a list of people who have yours. Let anyone take your calling card from your profile, but have the option to revoke it via your ‘followers’ list. Maybe this would work, maybe it wouldn’t. I’m not sure people would be too keen on the idea that their name (which is also their most valuable SL contact detail) could be jotted down by whoever feels like it. Perhaps a set of permissions would be needed — take freely, ask for permission, or by transfer only. Of course, the more you restrict who can have your details — the less useful these extra lists become — but I guess even in real life the person who’s details you want to record also has to volunteer them first.

So would this be useful to you? Personally I reckon there would be quite a few people on my ‘following’ list that wouldn’t be on my friends list — so I’d argue that it would definitely be useful to me. What do other people think?

I’ll be looking to ask you about what it is that you do in world and how you do it. Interviews should take around forty minutes and will ideally be done by text chat in IM. All interviews will be confidential and your participation won’t be disclosed to a third-party. Also, due to restrictions posed by my university’s ethics comittee, all participants must be over the age of 18 in real life.

I’m looking to begin interviewing this Friday and continuing over the weekend and into next week, so if you’d be interested in participating please drop me a message — I’m @AzAfterthought on Twitter, Az Afterthought in Second Life, and of course you can use the comments section here or the email form on the contact page.

Many thanks in advance, I look forward to meeting some of you in-world

“Provide persistent identity to encourage responsible behaviour, individual accountability, and the development of lasting relationships”

For Second Life, persistant identity both is and isn’t a problem. Although by and large, most people have a primary user account and a small handful of alts without causing any problems at all — a lot of people take pleasure in creating account after account to perform illegal, or simply nuisance activities. Many papers make the point that much of this relates to an inability to penalise an individual, or even an invested identity, rather than just an account. As Cheng and colleagues pointed out, creating real-world links between an individual’s avatar and real-life identity seemed to be very effective at reducing the amount of in-world griefing. Although Second Life sometimes ban accounts, or IP addresses, it’s difficult to ban an actual person. Perhaps if rumoured Facebook integration goes far enough, this might change to some extent. Account verification for all could be another possibility.

“Support custom profile information that addresses the privacy concerns of individuals.”

As V-Chat developed it became clear to the MS team that users were not filling in their profiles with accurate information. Some fields contained fake information, others were left blank. When developing their Virtual World Platform, they instead decided to implement, a permissions feature, not unlike the one that can be seen on Facebook. Specific profile items could be assigned “Private”, “Friends Only”, or “Public”. What the team discovered was that not only did this result in both a greater amount of fields being filled and with accurate real life information, they also discovered that users were taking the time to read other people’s profiles more often. Prior to this, profiles were largely ignored.

“Help people coordinate finding and meeting those they care about to increase the likelihood of positive interactions.”

One of the major problems with Second Life is networking. You only need to look at how many SL users have signed up to Twitter, Plurk, and Facebook in order to socialise with other people. This had been identified early on by Cheng and colleagues who write “being unable to coordinate finding similar people or meeting friends in a virtual environment is a barrier to entry.” Perhaps then, we can reflect on some of Second Life’s recent bad press as a networking failure by the journalists involved.

“Different communities have different needs and require different user interfaces.”

By integrating active scripting and DHTML, Microsoft enabled users to customise aspects of their user interface in order to better suit different purposes. Typically these were customised by the world builder themselves, so much like a Sim builder would create the virtual environment, so too would they have control over the user’s client. The examples they give include custom user profiles, and side-bar bulletin boards. So popular was this functionality that the Cheng and colleagues report that almost all virtual builds included user interface customisation to some extent.

Although we see this to some extent with the inclusion of HUDs, Second Life builders or sim owners do not have such a major control over the user interface. Just imagine how different Sims would be if they did! You’d visit a shop and find a sidebar load up with their special offers, you’d visit a roleplaying sim to discover that you’ve got a dozen new fields on your profile to fill in character information, or an enterprise sim might give you access to minutes or documents. It would certainly be a different experience.

Summary

So there you have it, four design guidelines courtesy of Microsoft’s Virtual Worlds Research team. As for the other five, well they were largely adhered to. Still it’s strange to think how different Second Life would be if these extra few features were incorporated, particularly that last one — giving builders and sim owners control over the client could essentially be game changing — making virtual worlds customisable on every level. I live in hope!

References

• Cheng, L., Farnham, S., & Stone, L. (2002). Lessons learned: Building and deploying shared virtual environments. In R. Schroeder (Ed.), The social life of avatars (pp. 90–111). London: Springer-Verlag. Amazon UK | US

Since the 70s the study of presence has changed somewhat. Rather than the study of ‘social presence’ per se, we see the concept extended into the domains of presence and co-presence. Whereas co-presence has come to mean much the same as social-presence did, presence refers to the extent that one feels actually located within a certain environment, real or otherwise. These can be further combined  to form what Ralph Schroeder (2006) refers to as connected presence, the feeling of being there together.

Second Life operates on all of these levels, we experience both a feeling of presence and a feeling of co-presence. The feelings of connectedness we get with other avatars is the extent to which we feel co-presence — our feeling of actually being in-world, a measure of our presence.

Yet to some extent the feelings of presence and co-presence are ambiguous, the definitions I gave above are misleadingly clear cut. For example, when I’m in Second Life, am I feeling co-presence in relation to the user or the avatar itself? It’s clear that many users opt to divulge little about their actual identities, sometimes to the point at which their avatar is no more them then an actor is the character they portray. Under such circumstances am I still feeling the same kind of co-presence as I do with a person who is being themselves? Presence too is mediated by many factors, with one person’s experience of presence not necesarily being the same as someone else’s. As I’ll discuss in future posts, both presence and co-presence can be affected by a multitude of things, some technical but many more not. Social factors are just as important, so too are factors relating to behaviour, neurology, attention, and experience. As a result even text-based environments can provide deep immersive experiences as Towell and Towell (1997) noted when they reported that 69% of the 207 MUD users they studied claimed to experience feelings of presence.

When it comes to creating a reliable feeling of presence or co-presence, it’s not a case of simply — the better the technology, the better the presence. Short and colleagues definition of social presence as “a quality of the medium of itself” no longer stands. Just reflect for a second on the different ways people use Second Life. There are those who don’t take it seriously, who see it as they do any other game, whereas there are those who’ve created rich social networks, complete with its own codes of conduct, for whom Second Life is just as important as their lives in the physical world. Although the technology arguably provides the baseline presence experience, it’s ultimately down to the individual’s psyche to push it that extra mile.

References

• Schroeder, R. (2006). Being there together and the future of connected presence. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15, 438–454.
• Short, J., Williams, E., & Christie, B. (1977). The social psychology of telecommunications. John Wiley and Sons.
• Towell, J., & Towell, E. (1997). Presence in text-based networked virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 6, 590–595.

With my next post I hope to change all that. My plan is to run a fairly regular, or at least weekly, post series where I’ll talk about proper academic research and topics, giving overviews, spliced with some opinions, on published research that might be appealing to people with a general interest in the psychology of virtual worlds (and to some extent telepresence). Topics and papers that I’ll be choosing to write about will vary, although I’ll try to go for things that are more likely to be new to most readers, rather than telling them things they already know. As part of that, I’d be interested to know what questions you have or what topics specifically interest you — my specialities are in psychology and cognitive ergonomics, so hopefully I’ll be able to answer a good range of questions ranging from social interaction to user-centred design. If there’s anything you’d specifically like to see covered, please post it in the comments section and I’ll see what I can do.

For my first post I’m going to write about a framework in which virtual reality is usually interpreted. It’ll be barebones stuff, but should provide some context as to how virtual reality, from a non-technical point of view, is approached. I’m not going to say much about it now, but hopefully it should make for an interesting read. With a bit of luck I’ll have written sometime before the end of the weekend.

I’ve heard about the simulated reality theory before and never really paid it much attention — the idea that we’re all just pieces of computer programming, living and thinking as defined by some arbitrary piece of code seemed a little crackpot to me —  maybe even cultish. Yet when I read the article I was amazed to discover that actually, there’s a very reasonable, and almost scary, argument as to why this could be the case.

As users of Second Life, we’re all familiar with virtual worlds, what they mean, what they look like, and how they’re steadily evolving. The Second Life of 2009 was a very different place to what it was five years ago, and no doubt we’ll see just as much change within the next. The same can be said of Artificial Intelligence, year after year it improves, becoming increasingly human-like. The question is, where will it stop? There is no doubt in mind, that at some point in the future, some lab somewhere, will have developed a complete, living breathing virtual world, with completely autonomous avatars controlled by exceedingly sophisticated AI. Chances are it won’t be just one either, but rather thousands upon thousands of emulations created for all kinds of purposes. But then what if one of those simulated worlds evolve to the point where it decides to create it’s own simulation? We quickly get started on an almost endless chain of worlds within worlds, simulations within simulations — where only one original exists, but countless emulations. And if any one of those worlds was singled out, it’s not only possible, but incredibly likely, that that particular world is one of the simulations.

Of course there’s loads of arguments as to why this shouldn’t be the case — perhaps such simulations can’t occur, or wouldn’t be deemed ethical by a civilisation advanced enough to create them. On top of that, most of the general arguments against creationism also stand. But still it’s a compelling thought isn’t it?

Second Life

The Second Life ‘Social’ user base will begin to fall.

2010 will be the year that Blue Mars reaches mass-market maturity, that new adult content policies take their toll, and the bot crack down continues to make waves (thanks to Ener and Wizard for pointing that out in the comments of my last post). The increase in the number of low budget PCs and netbooks, also don’t bode well for graphically intensive virtual worlds (who knows, maybe we’ll even see an official ‘light’ or web-based client).

Rise in Business Users

Second Life has huge potential as a tool for real-world business collaboration, provided it manages to get over a few reputation issues and learn how to market it well. I think 2010 will see an increase in the amount of businesses giving virtual world communications a shot.

More Bad Press

Linden seems to be pretty good at making unpopular decisions lately as well as failing to deal with piracy issues. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few high-profile sellers or community members leave as a result, with various popblogs using them as sufficient evidence to declare SL dead. I think we’re due a TV documentary along the same lines too — ‘The Rise and Fall of Second Life’ maybe?

Also…

If I had to make any far out guesses, I’d say acquisition of Linden if the amount of active residents declines enough. Maybe make that a 2011 or 12 prediction. Other than that, more incentives for premium users, and probably just your standard new feature announcements that everyone will hate, most likely ones relating to money raising attempts, a la Linden Homes or XStreet fees. In a nightmarish (and improbable) 2010 this will take the form of Linden Taxes.

Telepresence

Another year of growth

One thing that we have Cisco’s marketting department to thank for is how well they’ve promoted the concept of telepresence as much as they’ve promoted their product. They’ll continue to do this, and sales will continue to rise for all companies. Guess that’s an obvious prediction. But hey, it’s a prediction nonetheless.

Cisco moves into Traditional Video Conferencing

With the acquisition of Tandberg now under it’s belt, I think it’s a safe bet to say that we’ll start to see more traditional style video conferencing products bearing the Cisco logo. That’s the point when we’ll see that their talks about interoperability and standards meant with their own products rather than others. I’m keeping the reasons to myself on this one, but they could screw up really badly here, if they approach it with the same kind of philosophy they did with their translation service (and I was right about predicting FAIL on that one ).

Mainstream Desktop and Consumer Telepresence

Desktop and consumer telepresence will start to make a splash this year, perhaps making it’s first mainstream consumer debut towards the mid to end 2010. Although I’d say 12 months is unrealistic to expect it to catch on properly. I’m going to make the suggestion that this will be lead by Logitech with their recent acquisition of LifeSize. The main issue for consumer and desktop telepresence (beyond the concern that it can’t even be accomplished ) is the huge adoption speed it needs to be successful. If people don’t have anyone else to talk to, why would they buy it.  That wouldn’t be a problem for Logitech if they could somehow combine it with their existing webcam range. Perhaps we’ll see this done with some third party partner, such as Skype or Microsoft. Maybe even Google Telepresence? :O

3D Telepresence

3D telepresence (of the googles variety) will be demonstrated. It would certainly be an ambitious thing to do and definitely a marvelous thing to see — but it would screw up the user experience hugely. Expect it to come from either Cisco as a marketing gimmick (like they’ve done with holographic telepresence) or from an unknown.

So that’s it… a bunch of predictions ranging from the obvious to the ludicrous. But it’s just for fun, I look forward to seeing how many I can tick off this time next year!