Abstract
At The Open University in the UK, we have conducted empirical qualitative
research in Second Life, a 3D virtual world. The first project is
in the education domain in which we are investigating the designs
of learning spaces in Second Life, while the second project is related
to shopping and consumer behaviour of users in Second Life. In this
paper, we discuss our experiences of conducting empirical research
in 3D virtual worlds with a specific focus on the following aspects:
ethical norms, real-world and virtual identities, privacy of the
participants, communication modalities (voice, text and use of gestures),
logistics of conducting user-based studies, and skills and training
needs of researchers. Although our experiences are based on conducting
empirical research in Second Life, we hope that our experiences and
discussions in this paper will also be useful for researchers who
aim to conduct research in avatar-based 3D virtual worlds other than
Second Life.
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