The 'out-of-avatar experience': object-focused collaboration in Second Life

Abstract

Much of our current understanding of collaboration around objects in collaborative virtual environments comes from studies conducted with experimental immersive systems. Now Internet-based desktop virtual worlds (VWs) have become a popular form of 3d environment, and have been proposed for a variety of workplace scenarios. One popular VW, Second Life (SL), allows its users to create and manipulate objects. This provides an opportunity to examine the problems and practices of object-focused collaboration in a current system and compare them to prior results. We studied small groups as they assembled objects in SL under varying conditions. In this paper we discuss the problems they encountered..