Energizing business transactions in virtual worlds: an empirical study of consumers’ purchasing behaviors

Virtual marketplaces for products and services have become major profit sources in virtual worlds (VWs). The large quantity and growth of virtual product transactions and their platform providers’ profits have made it critical to understand consumer purchasing behavior in VWs. However, as open-ended VWs such as Second Life have environments that differ from those of other online communities, the underlying mechanisms of consumers’ e-commerce behavior may not explain their VW behavior. Therefore, this study examines consumers’ VW behavior by considering three categories of factors influencing their purchasing behavior: the platform context (i.e., technical characteristics such as interactivity and vividness and social characteristics such as involvement), product context (i.e., product value), and virtual experience (i.e., flow and satisfaction). This study examines how these factors affect consumers when they purchase virtual products. Its results highlight the importance of flow experience in consumers’ VW behavior. Interactivity, vividness, and involvement are found to affect consumers’ virtual experience—flow, and involvement exhibits a significantly stronger influence on flow. Flow and involvement are found to affect product value, and flow exerts a stronger influence than involvement on product value. Flow and product value directly impact consumers’ willingness to purchase, whereas satisfaction with the virtual world experience, which is significantly affected by flow, is not associated with willingness to purchase. The results further indicate that product value is more influential on willingness to purchase than is flow. After describing the study’s contributions to both research and practice, I conclude the paper by presenting avenues for future research.     

Coram Populo—In the Presence of People: The Effect of Others in Virtual Worlds

3D virtual worlds (VWs) enable perception of others' presence and actions. However, it is unclear how this influences behaviors in group tasks. We study the influence of ‘perceived colocation’ and ‘perceived coaction’, on cognitive absorption, which in turn predicts participative behaviors. Perceived colocation and coaction are central to social facilitation effects, tested primarily in face‐to‐face settings. We use distraction‐conflict theory to explain how these may occur in VWs. Results from a quasi‐experiment in Second Life support our hypotheses. We demonstrate the influence of perceived colocation and coaction and extend the applicability of social facilitation effects by incorporating the concept of cognitive absorption in VWs. We conclude with suggestions for the use of VWs for decision‐making tasks.     

Interaction design studio learning in virtual worlds

The paper suggests that virtual worlds (VWs) have many unique advantages for supporting interaction design studio activities, provided that they are designed to include appropriate workplaces and interactive tools to foster collaboration and creativity. We present an approach for employing VWs that proposes the use of prospective tools and workplaces throughout the following key activities of interaction design studio courses: design brief, design thinking, design practice (conceptual and detailed), the desk crit, design review and user evaluation. Then, we describe a blended interaction design studio course on the basis of this approach, which ran through a whole semester. We found that the VW design studio is an engaging and constructive experience for students: In the VW environment, students and tutors held many online meetings, and students constructed several models about their design project, developed a digital prototype and conducted a remote usability evaluation. In addition, the persistence of the environment and the developed VW tools helped students and tutors to achieve careful feedback and reflection during the design project lifetime. Nevertheless, a number of challenges remain for wider implementation: the refinement of the instructional design approach, the usability of VW tools, further integration of VWs to professional design tools and the conduction of other full-scale VW design studio courses.     

Design and evaluation of virtual environments mechanisms to support remote collaboration on complex process diagrams

Many organizational analysis tasks are solved by collaborating teams. In technology-mediated collaborations, enabling relevant visual cues is a core issue with existing technology. We explore whether avatars can provide relevant cues in collaborative virtual environments. To do so, we develop a research prototype for a collaborative virtual environment that utilises avatars to improve workspace awareness in collaborative tasks. We test this solution through two studies, qualitative and quantitative, in which participants have to collaborate to jointly validate and correct a diagrammatic model of operational procedures.Our evaluations provide both positive and negative results about the proposed prototype. Collaboration patterns changed and became significantly easier, but, task performance was only slightly improved. Together, these findings inform both the ongoing development of collaborative 3D virtual environments and the role of technology-mediated collaboration for validating and fixing models of processes.     

Playing in the mud: Virtual worlds are real places

This paper is about how developers will know whether intelligent virtual environments (IVEs) are appropriate for the tasks set to them. There are several important research questions that need to be answered before they can even begin to build IVEs for some of the more promising applications, such as entertainment, education, collaboration on research and development, military, and other training. The main technical point is that every aspect of any IVE involves model, and the modeling needs to be addressed very directly and explicitly. This paper is more for the developers of such systems and the potential customers, than for the users. More is written about what is important to consider as one contemplates, for example, a difficult collaborative task, than about what it will be like to live in these IVEs. The authors believe that IVEs must be expanded to become virtual worlds (VWs), and that the modeling sophistication required for any of the serious applications described above is much more than is currently available in the VWs seen, even the ones with good graphics. Finally, the connection between Virtual Reality and CyberSpace is made, and the authors explain their expectations will be explained for the future of CyberSpace.     

Churn prediction and social neighbour influences for different types of user groups in virtual worlds

In virtual worlds (VWs), users have more VW games alternatives, whereas VW companies consequently suffer from high customer turnover rate and low customer loyalty. Therefore, building a churn prediction model to facilitate subsequent churn management and customer retention is important. The churn behaviours and the impact of social neighbour influences to customer churn may be different for different types of users. Accordingly, we segment users into stable, unstable, and solitary user groups according to their social contact behaviours in VWs. Novel segmentation‐based churn prediction approaches are proposed for churn prediction in VWs by building prediction models for each type of user groups and considering the effect of social neighbour influences for different user groups. The proposed approaches are evaluated by conducting experiments with a dataset collected from a VW platform. The experimental results show different churn prediction performances under different user groups. The segmentation‐based churn prediction approaches perform better than do general approaches without considering user groups. Moreover, the results also reveal that social neighbour influences have a positive impact on stable and unstable users. The proposed work contributes to investigating the social neighbour influences on churn prediction for different types of user groups in VWs.     

Real-World Opportunities for Virtual- World Project Management

Virtual worlds provide technology capabilities that could transform education, communication and collaboration, and project management. Virtual spaces resemble the real world but without its physical limitations. Innovative companies and educational institutions are already finding ways to incorporate VW technology into their organizations. A VW research project conducted in Second Life highlights these new environments' unique technology capabilities. Such capabilities can provide richer, immersive, engaging environments to help overcome traditional barriers to virtual collaboration. By understanding this research, businesses interested in taking advantage of VWs can gain a greater appreciation of the opportunities and challenges involved.     

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.     

Store selection criteria and sales prediction in virtual worlds

Virtual worlds (VWs) have emerged as a new context for gaming, collaboration, social networking but also commercial activity. This paper focuses on the latter, and investigates how consumers behave in this virtual context when selecting stores they visit or buy from. The paper explores store selection criteria in virtual world stores and extends earlier research in both offline and online commercial environments, taking into account the novel IT capabilities that VWs exploit. Theoretical insights drawn from the marketing and information systems literature have been used to guide the design of a survey conducted in the virtual world Second Life. In addition to identifying the factors influencing store selection, the paper investigates how these differ between shoppers and non-shoppers, and identifies the factors that affect the amount of money spent in virtual world shopping environments. The findings suggest that “Core Store Features” and “Security and Privacy” constitute the most important store selection factors in virtual environments and that sales in VWs are predicted by the frequency of visiting and the time spent within VWs’ stores. Building on these findings, the paper discusses theoretical and practical implications and further research perspectives in the context of (3D) online commerce.     

Cross‐platform management of intelligent objects behaviors in serious virtual environments

In this paper, we present a generic interaction framework that controls intelligent objects' actions in different virtual world (VW) platforms. These actions are based on the state of external platform‐independent artificial intelligence‐based systems such as multi‐agent and rule‐based systems. We have evaluated the proposed framework by means of two intelligent objects, a door and a noticeboard, incorporating them in Second Life and OpenWonderland VWs. These objects allow to work along three advanced aspects of a serious virtual environment: it is a dynamic space where participants are synchronously informed about activities evolution inside the virtual space, it can integrate processes and information coming from the real world, and it needs norms to organize participants actions, to define actions consequences, and to prevent undesired participants behaviors. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Risky business or sharing the load? - Social flow in collaborative mobile learning

Mobile learning has been built upon the premise that we can transform traditional classroom or computer-based learning activities into a more ubiquitous and connected form of learning. Tentative outcomes from this assertion have been witnessed in many collaborative learning activities, but few analytic observations on what triggers this collaboration have so far been made. However Social Flow, a concept framework that extends Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, may help us to partially explain the triggering mechanism of collaborative mobile learning. Our case study in this article, where learners together explore a built environment as part of a simulated security guard training programme, describes how the concept of social flow in a collaborative learning space might sketch out what triggers an optimal learning experience in collaboration and what can be additionally achieved in a collaborative learning experience. In this learning context, collaborative mobile learning might be seen to prompt more knowledge generation and extra learning tasks by fostering greater motivation than other learning environments.     

Trust in information sources: seeking information from people,documents, and virtual agents

The notion of trust has been virtually absent from most work on how people assess and choose their information sources. Based on two empirical cases this study shows that software engineers and users of e-commerce websites devote a lot of attention to considerations about the trustworthiness of their sources, which include people, documents, and virtual agents. In the project-based software engineering environment trust tends to be a collaborative issue and the studied software engineers normally know their sources first-hand or have them recommended by colleagues. Outside this network people are cautious and alert to even feeble cues about source trustworthiness. For example, users of e-commerce websites—generally perceived as single-user environments—react rather strongly to the visual appearance of virtual agents, though this is clearly a surface attribute. Across the two cases people need access to their sources in ways that enable them to assess source trustworthiness, access alone is not enough.     

Beyond e-business models: the road to virtual worlds

Virtual Worlds (or, VWs) are an intriguing field of research. In particular, VWs appear to create new opportunities for integrating the business of the firm with Information Technology (or, IT). This article is a first attempt to address the topic of how owning and maintaining a VW can impact on the business models of firms and on the literature on business models, and VWs are examined in order to understand the relationship between them. A qualitative methodology is proposed to sketch a radar map framework, which is able to identify value drivers and the subsequent impact on elements of value proposition. Although they need to be tested and verified, the findings provided in this work might offer support for firms looking to VWs as a new way to implement a winning business model. Finally, suggestions for empowering future research are proposed and examined.     

Human-systems interaction for virtual environment team training

Virtual environments are increasingly used to support collaborative activities and distance learning. However, few are designed to support students, instructors and simulations in multi-participant team training. This paper describes the Training Studio, a system for authoring, delivering and evaluating multi-participant team training in an immersed virtual environment. The Training Studio focuses on human-systems interaction, allowing multiple students to learn and perform team tasks. The Training Studio supports collaborative learning for either single or multi-participant activity. This is accomplished through the use of agents which are assigned to students to act as personal mentors or missing team members. Conducting team training within a virtual environment introduces complexities and issues unique to team training and multiple-participant virtual environments. This paper describes our approach to virtual environment team training, discussing issues confronted and resulting design considerations and implementations.     

Collaboration,connectedness, and community: An examination of the factors influencing student persistence in virtual communities

Institutions of higher education are being called upon to provide a more robust pathway to a college degree and improve upon the advanced workforce for the needs of the 21st century. While active collaborative learning environments have been encouraged in higher education to improve student engagement, there is a gap in the literature when it comes to connecting the two research areas of collaborative learning and student intention to persist. This research fills this gap by creating and conducting research to examine a model that measures the factors that significantly influence a student's persistence in a virtual collaborative learning environment. The model examines how collaborative learning, campus connectedness, sense of community, organizational commitment, and turnover intention influence student persistence. The model was tested using a sample of students who participated in a virtual learning community (VLC) and the results suggest that all but one of the factors were found to significantly influence student persistence, with the final factor dependent on the number of hours of system usage. We discuss the implications of the research and the model for team-based theory and organizational practice in education and teamwork.     

The virtual playground: an educational virtual reality environment for evaluating interactivity and conceptual learning

The research presented in this paper aims at investigating user interaction in immersive virtual learning environments, focusing on the role and the effect of interactivity on conceptual learning. The goal has been to examine if the learning of young users improves through interacting in (i.e. exploring, reacting to, and acting upon) an immersive virtual environment (VE) compared to non-interactive or non-immersive environments. Empirical work was carried out with more than 55 primary school students between the ages of 8 and 12, in different between-group experiments: an exploratory study, a pilot study, and a large-scale experiment. The latter was conducted in a virtual environment designed to simulate a playground. In this “Virtual Playground,” each participant was asked to complete a set of tasks designed to address arithmetical “fractions” problems. Three different conditions, two experimental virtual reality (VR) conditions and a non-VR condition, that varied the levels of activity and interactivity, were designed to evaluate how children accomplish the various tasks. Pre-tests, post-tests, interviews, video, audio, and log files were collected for each participant, and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. This paper presents a selection of case studies extracted from the qualitative analysis, which illustrate the variety of approaches taken by children in the VEs in response to visual cues and system feedback. Results suggest that the fully interactive VE aided children in problem solving but did not provide a strong evidence of conceptual change as expected; rather, it was the passive VR environment, where activity was guided by a virtual robot, that seemed to support student reflection and recall, leading to indications of conceptual change.     

A multimedia-enhanced collaborative learning environment

Abstract The proliferation of the Internet has brought about the notion of online virtual communities. One enabling technology for online communities is multiuser environments such as Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs) and Object-Oriented MUDS (MOOs). These text-based collaborative learning environments have recently have been integrated with the World Wide Web, thus harnessing the graphics and multimedia-rich environments available therein. Learners can directly experience, manipulate, and create objects in their rich multimedia form. MUDs and MOOs are augmented with synchronous collaboration technology that provided simultaneous control and viewing of shared documents and applications. In this paper, we describe a multimedia-enhanced MOO system called SpaceALIVE! and our experiences from a pilot project involving Singapore students who use SpaceALIVE! as a collaborative learning environment are reported.     

From Cognitive Load Theory to Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory

Cognitive load theory has traditionally been associated with individual learning. Based on evolutionary educational psychology and our knowledge of human cognition, particularly the relations between working memory and long-term memory, the theory has been used to generate a variety of instructional effects. Though these instructional effects also influence the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative learning, be it computer supported or face-to-face, they are often not considered either when designing collaborative learning situations/environments or researching collaborative learning. One reason for this omission is that cognitive load theory has only sporadically concerned itself with certain particulars of collaborative learning such as the concept of a collective working memory when collaborating along with issues associated with transactive activities and their concomitant costs which are inherent to collaboration. We illustrate how and why cognitive load theory, by adding these concepts, can throw light on collaborative learning and generate principles specific to the design and study of collaborative learning.