Roomware: computers disappear and interaction evolves

We develop a comprehensive approach to the design of information and collaboration environments that support human activities by starting in the real world. Our goal is to design environments that combine the affordances of real objects with potential computer-based support in the virtual world. This combination generates hybrid worlds that have significant consequences for the design of human-computer interaction. Hybrid worlds allow human-information interaction and human-human communication to move into the foreground while the computer disappears into the background.     

Process-aware approach for managing organisational knowledge

Knowledge is currently considered an asset for organisations. In this new paradigm, Knowledge Management (KM) is emerging as an unavoidable activity for organisations. Information and communications technologies, together with business policies, become a tool par excellence for supporting the creation of KM platforms that provide access to organisation knowledge resources such as workers, technical reports, software applications, and business documents. In spite of the benefits provided by current KM platforms, most of them were designed to manage a single type of knowledge (tacit or explicit) without considering either the form in which organisational areas need knowledge to be provided (reactive or proactive) or the integration with business processes. This work presents a process-aware approach to develop KM platforms linked to business processes with semantic capability to manage knowledge objects with natural language content as well as to support social interactions and ad hoc working groups. To this aim, a comprehensive analysis of influencing-KM factors to be addressed by technological solutions is considered by a set of technological requirements. Based on these requirements, a model that provides the main components to be addressed by KM approaches is specified and implemented by a technological platform. This platform goes after a balance between technological and social aspects that support and promote collaboration and communication among organisation members.     

Predicting users' return to virtual worlds: a social perspective

Virtual worlds or three‐dimensional computer‐based simulated environments have received considerable attention as platforms for entertainment, education and commerce. In contrast to a web site, for example, where a user interacts with a two‐dimensional site, virtual worlds provide a platform in which users can interact with other individuals, sometimes including strangers, within three‐dimensional environments. Virtual worlds afford a form of ‘socialness’ unlike many other technologies, often motivating a user – by virtue of these social experiences – to return. Drawing on the Spatial Model of Interaction and Awareness‐Attention Theory, we demonstrate that besides social aspects, which include social awareness and social perception, flow experience, which is the mental state of being fully absorbed and somewhat lost in time, is an essential ingredient in an individual's decision to return to a virtual world. We also demonstrate how characteristics of the technology are linked to the social aspects experienced in virtual worlds. A laboratory study conducted in a virtual world, Second Life, supports our assertions and identifies state predictors of flow that influence individuals' intentions to return to the virtual world environment.     

Collaborative learning in multi-user virtual environments

Multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) have captured the attention and interest of educators as remote collaborative learning environments due to their immersion, interaction and communication capabilities. However, productive learning interactions cannot be considered a given and careful consideration of the design of learning activities and organizational support must be provided to foster collaboration. In this paper, a model to support collaborative learning in MUVEs is presented. This model enables the scaffolding of learning workflows and organizes collaborative learning activities by regulating interactions. Software architecture is developed to support the model, and to deploy and enact collaborative learning modules. A user-centered design has been followed to identify successful strategies for modeling collaborative learning activities in a case study. The results show how interactions with elements of 3D virtual worlds can enforce collaboration in MUVEs.     

Perceived enablers of 3D virtual environments for virtual team learning and innovation

Virtual teams consist of geographically distributed employees working with a common goal using mostly technology for communication and collaboration. Virtual teams face a number of challenges, discussed in the literature in terms of communication through technology, difficulty in building trust, conveying social cues, and creating awareness, as well as cultural differences. These challenges impact collaboration, but also learning and innovation. This research focuses on how a social medium, the 3D virtual environment, is perceived to enable learning and innovation in virtual teams. We study this through a qualitative study based on interviews of distributed work managers’ perception of VEs. The major findings are that VEs are perceived to create collaborative learning atmospheres for virtual teams in terms of enabling engagement, a shared context awareness, and support in social network building. Another finding is that VEs are perceived to enable team learning, knowledge development, and collaboration through persistence of content, information sharing, learning through role-plays and simulations, and visualization. Furthermore, VEs enable the development of co-created content as well as new ways of working in virtual teams.     

Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings

As research on virtual worlds gains increasing attention in educational, commercial, and military domains, a consideration of how player populations are ‘reassembled’ through social scientific data is a timely matter for communication scholars. This paper describes a large‐scale study of virtual worlds in which participants were recruited at public gaming events, as opposed to through online means, and explores the dynamic relationships between players and contexts of play that this approach makes visible. Challenging conventional approaches to quantitatively driven virtual worlds research, which categorizes players based on their involvement in an online game at a particular point in time, this account demonstrates how players' networked gaming activities are contingent on who they are playing with, where, and when.     

Exploring the potential of virtual worlds in engaging older people and supporting healthy aging

There is an increasing need to find innovative activities to help the older population maintain a healthy life. Virtual worlds, which can provide social engagement, entertainment and creativity as well as useful information and services for older people might offer a solution to this issue. Although emerging studies have begun to look into the benefits of virtual worlds in healthcare, little has been done in the context of older people. Based on semi-structured interviews and previous research on healthy aging, we identified and described in depth four areas in which virtual worlds could be useful to support older people. In general, it was found that virtual worlds could help empower older people to manage their disabilities, facilitate social engagement, provide mental stimulation and productive activities.     

Decision-making in-socio and in-situ: Facilitation in virtual worlds

Past research suggests that “situatedness”, i.e. the context, as well as the social interaction that occurs within it, play an important role in cognitive processes such as learning and decision-making. Thus far, IT tools have been limited in the level and type of situatedness they facilitate. The advent of virtual worlds has changed this. Virtual worlds provide open, three-dimensional platforms for creating and designing real life-like spaces; they also allow for interaction between users in the form of “avatars” in that space. This research study focuses on virtual worlds as platforms for learning and decision-making. We propose a model that explains how individuals in a group learn and make decisions through a process that is influenced by the two unique characteristics of virtual worlds that enable situatedness: the facilitation for designing real life-like spaces, and the facilitation of rich many-to-many interactions.We draw on theories of situated cognition, social cognition, and flow to explicate the influence of these characteristics on the process of learning and decision-making. Data was collected by means of a quasi-experiment in Second Life (SL). Results from this study extend and validate the predictions of situated theories of decision-making within the context of a virtual world environment and suggest guidelines for practitioners who wish to use such environments to support organizational learning and decision-making. Perhaps the most compelling of these is to focus on maximizing the immersion of the individual in the activity by stimulating his or her perceptions of others and activity-related cues in the environment.     

Creative Problem Solving in Second Life: An Action Research Study

A digital Creative Problem‐Solving (CPS) process was facilitated in a 3D virtual world in order to assess whether such an environment was conducive to remote synchronous creative collaboration. IBM associates comprised the majority of the group that was involved in the process. Insights regarding the experience working within this virtual environment are discussed at length as seen through the eyes of the authors (CPS facilitators) of this paper and through the eyes of the participants. Data was gathered through a short feedback form administered to all participants, and informal interviews were also held to explore ways to improve the CPS experience. Results were encouraging. In common, participants reported that their experiences were deeply engaging and conducive to creative collaboration. An argument is made for the early adoption and use of this type of virtual worlds for remote‐synchronous creativity interactions. Finally, from a systems view of creativity, the authors identify opportunities for future research studies that examine the efficacy of creative collaboration within virtual worlds.     

面向虚拟游戏拓展的智能小车设计

在生活中虚拟游戏越来越受到人们的青睐,其中手机网络游戏是人们娱乐生活最受欢迎的休闲活动方式。目前该类虚拟游戏缺少相应的配套硬件,缺乏交互感,为此将手机游戏与硬件融合具有重要的意义。本文一方面以安卓手机为平台,结合MIT App Inventor软件开发手机APP。另一方面以stm32单片机、蓝牙通讯模块为硬件平台实现配件中心转速、方向控制和故障监控。利用互联网让虚拟游戏和传统的玩具小车相结合,实现手机游戏的真实体验感,为将来虚拟游戏提供设计和方案。     

IT‐mediated social interactions and knowledge sharing: Role of competence‐based trust and background heterogeneity

In the knowledge‐based economy, organizational success is dependent on how effectively organizational employees share information. Many studies have investigated how different types of communication activities and communications media influence knowledge sharing. We contribute to this literature by examining increasingly prevalent yet understudied IT‐mediated social interactions and their effects on knowledge sharing among employees in comparison to face‐to‐face social connections. By integrating the literature on knowledge sharing, social networks, and information systems, we theorize the ability of IT‐mediated social interaction to (1) afford interactions between individuals with heterogeneous backgrounds and (2) facilitate frequent IT‐mediated social interactions that are high in competence‐based trust—both supporting effective sharing of knowledge. Through a social network analysis of the employees in a high‐tech organization, this study finds that IT‐mediated frequent social interactions are the most effective in promoting knowledge sharing.     

Cognitive revolution, virtuality and good life

We are living in an era when the focus of human relationships with the world is shifting from execution and physical impact to control and cognitive/informational interaction. This emerging, increasingly informational world is our new ecology, an infosphere that presents the grounds for a cognitive revolution based on interactions in networks of biological and artificial, intelligent agents. After the industrial revolution, which extended the human body through mechanical machinery, the cognitive revolution extends the human mind/cognition through information-processing machinery. These novel circumstances come with new qualities and preferences demanding new conceptualizations. We have some work ahead of us to establish value systems and practices extended from the real to the increasingly virtual/info-computational. This paper first presents a current view of the virtual versus the real and then offers an interpretation framework based on an info-computational understanding of cognition in which agency implies computational processing of informational structures of the world as an infosphere. The notion of “good life” is discussed in light of different ideals of well-being in the infosphere, connecting virtuality as a space of potential and alternative worlds for an agent for whom the reality is a space of actual experiences, in the sense of Deleuze. Even though info-computational framework enables us to see both the real world and the diversity of virtual worlds in terms of computational processes on informational structures, based on a distinct layered cognitive architecture of all physical agents, there is clear difference between potential worlds of the virtual and actual agent’s experiences made in the real. Info-computationalism enables insight into the mechanisms of infosphere and elucidates its importance as cognitively predominant environment and communication media. The conclusion is that by cocooning ourselves in an elaborate info-computational infrastructure of the virtual, we may be increasingly isolating ourselves from the reality of direct experience of the world. The biggest challenges of the cognitive revolution may not be technological but ethical. They are about the nature of being human and its values.     

Multi-user mixed reality system ‘Gulliver’s World’: a case study on collaborative edutainment at the intersection of material and virtual worlds

This case study is about ‘Gulliver’s World’, a multi-user mixed reality environment that functions simultaneously as interactive edutainment platform and learning environment as well as flexible infrastructure for the expansion of mixed reality environments via innovations in technology and media art. As an exhibition project, the installation is characterized by a nonlinear exhibition concept that activates interaction between individual users and different modes of virtual reality as well as collaboration among the users themselves. At seven workstations, people of all age groups range along the Reality–Virtuality continuum while collaboratively creating 3D worlds. Results of these creation activities are interactive worlds at the nexus of theatre, digital film production and game environment. As a research project, ‘Gulliver’s World’ features multilevel infrastructure with exemplary content in which the latest insights and models to emerge from HCI research as well as concepts of mixed reality and virtual environments and their supporting technology are brought together and developed further.     

Experiments with Face-To-Face Collaborative AR Interfaces

We describe a design approach, Tangible Augmented Reality, for developing face-to-face collaborative Augmented Reality (AR) interfaces. Tangible Augmented Reality combines Augmented Reality techniques with Tangible User Interface elements to create interfaces in which users can interact with spatial data as easily as real objects. Tangible AR interfaces remove the separation between the real and virtual worlds, and so enhance natural face-to-face communication. We present several examples of Tangible AR interfaces and results from a user study that compares communication in a collaborative AR interface to more traditional approaches. We find that in a collaborative AR interface people use behaviours that are more similar to unmediated face-to-face collaboration than in a projection screen interface.     

User goals in social virtual worlds: A means-end chain approach

The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to investigate user goals in social virtual worlds; second, to introduce a methodological alternative (i.e., a means-end chain approach) for analyzing user goals in cyberspaces. The data were acquired from a web survey, and were analyzed by means-end chain analysis (MECA), which produces users’ goal structure in reference to a hierarchical system of interrelated goals (Olson & Reynolds, 1983). The results show that people come to social virtual worlds to satisfy their social and hedonic needs, and to escape from real world constraints, as do virtual community members and virtual gamers; they also pursue unique activities, such as creating virtual objects and selling them. On the other hand, by clarifying relations among users’ goals, MECA provides a richer explanation for user goals than prior research which only offers separate user goals for cyberspace users without explanation of relationship among goals.     

Virtual item purchase behavior in virtual worlds: an exploratory investigation

Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, World of Warcraft and Everquest, have demonstrated huge economic potential. In such virtual worlds, virtual items are bought and sold between individuals for real money. However, little empirical research has been conducted into players’ purchase behavior in virtual worlds. To help us gain a better understanding of factors influencing purchase behavior in virtual worlds, we embarked on an exploratory study. Four focus groups were conducted with 24 participants, selected according to demographic and experiential characteristics. Preliminary empirical evidence suggests that factors including effort expectancy, character competency, the quality of the virtual world system, social influence, virtual item resources, personal real resources, performance expectancy, and self-actualization are important for predicting virtual item purchase behavior in virtual worlds. The results showed that virtual item purchase behavior in virtual worlds has considerable variability involving a range of factors at different stages.     

An interactional view of social presence: Making the virtual other “real”

In IS research, social presence is generally defined as the perceived capacity of a communication medium to convey contextual cues normally available in face‐to‐face settings. However, theorizing social presence as a property of the technology has been challenged for decades. The objective of this paper is to develop a more contemporary, interactional view of social presence. To this end, this paper develops a new conceptualization of how participants form the sense that each other is present. We characterize the development of this sense as a skilful accomplishment that entails interactants' joint construction of each other as “real.” Viewing social presence as contingent on social practice, we seek to answer the following research question: “How is social presence accomplished in virtual environments?” To explicate how virtual others are perceived as becoming socially present, that is, emotionally and psychologically “real” to someone interacting with them, we draw from Goffman's work, particularly his concepts of involvement and involvement obligation. Detailing two examples of social interaction in the virtual world Second Life, our analysis highlights the key role that this moral obligation, intrinsic to everyday social interaction, plays in virtual others becoming perceived as psychoemotionally “there.” By outlining a model of how the sense of a virtual other as “real” is produced in and through social interaction, our work contributes a sociological perspective to the construct of social presence and underscores some of the material and social conditions necessary for users to perceive virtual others as present.     

Spatial proximity to others determines how humans inhabit virtual worlds

Highly immersive three-dimensional virtual worlds have emerged as a popular medium for human social interactions. These environments enable multimodal sensory engagement and provide an immersive graphical representation of physical space where users can interact via avatars. However, when compared to two-dimensional virtual settings such as chats, virtual worlds impose constraints on social interactions due to the physical distance between individuals. Using the popular platform of Second Life as a model, we examined how humans manage this interindividual distance in virtual worlds. Taking advantage of methods developed in population ecology, we investigated how avatars are distributed in relation to each other to populate a virtual world. Our results revealed a striking dichotomy in the spatial relationships between avatars. Considerable aggregation, largely independent of population density, was observed alongside surprisingly marked physical isolation. These findings demonstrate that the spatial proximity to others determines how humans inhabit virtual worlds.     

基于Multi-Agent的虚拟组织知识管理研究

引入Multi-Agent平台于虚拟组织知识管理体系,研究提出了一种具有战略柔性的虚拟组织知识管理概念模型,强调对知识管理目标、组织、方法、过程、信息和文化等六要素的有机融合;并且,利用两状态Markov链描述了各A-gent之间的动态协作机制。     

Cyber-Physical-Social System Between a Humanoid Robot and a Virtual Human Through a Shared Platform for Adaptive Agent Ecology

Two artificial agents (a humanoid robot and a virtual human) are enriched with various similar intelligence, autonomy, functionalities and interaction modalities. The agents are integrated in the form of a cyber-physical-social system (CPSS) through a shared communication platform to create a social ecology. In the ecology, the agents collaborate (assist each other) to perform a real-world task (search for a hidden object) for the benefits of humans. A robot-virtual human bilateral trust model is derived and a real-time trust measurement method is developed. The role of taking initiative in the collaboration is switched between the agents following a finite state machine model triggered by bilateral trust, which results in a mixedinitiative collaboration. A scheme is developed to evaluate the performance of the agents in the ecology through the CPSS. The results show that the robot and the virtual human perform satisfactorily in the collaboration through the CPSS. The results thus prove the effectiveness of the real-world ecology between artificial agents of heterogeneous realities through a shared platform based on trust-triggered mixed-initiatives. The results can help develop adaptive social ecology comprising intelligent agents of heterogeneous realities to assist humans in various tasks through collaboration between the agents in the form of a CPSS.