Tutorial Outline: Interacting and Designing in Virtual Worlds on the Internet
Meeting hall in TheU Virtual University
campus
Tutorial Coordinator and Primary Instructor:
President and CEO
DigitalSpace Corporation
343 Soquel Ave, Suite 70
Santa Cruz CA 95062
Overview
Social activity in a cyberspace
virtual world: wedding in Alphaworld
This tutorial will introduce participants to
multi-user social virtual worlds hosted on the Internet. The instructor
and various virtual presenters will be on hand to introduce
and demonstrate the environments and help tutorial participants
engage in live exercises. These collaborative exercises will involve
the formation of teams of participants who will design a 3-D space,
construct that space and its interfaces, and support usability
testing of the space by participants at the tutorial and in on-line
virtual presence.
Material to be covered in the course
The course material will touch on several areas
of interactive design. Throughout the program, from the introductory
and tour sections to the design and collaborative hands-on building
exercises, the following areas will be stressed:
3-D Interfaces:
participants will engage in hands-on construction of 3-D spaces
and interfaces. Within seconds of each change, the views of all
participants will be updated. This facility will permit collaborative
construction and evaluation in real time. Tools available for
building include: in-world Renderware objects which can be replicated
and positioned with simple cursor key commands, VRML scenes which
can be imported, sound and voice which can be attached or transmitted
through the space, and images which can be generated by scanning
or paint systems and mapped onto objects. In addition, controls
to affect the behavior of objects, selectable surfaces, and links
to world wide web sites and other media can be added into the
3-D scenes.
Virtual community:
during the tour section, we will visit several on-line virtual
communities which have appeared within virtual world environments.
Participants and demonstrators alike will be able to communicate
with members of these communities, asking them about their experiences
there. During the hands-on exercises, an ad-hoc virtual community
will be created within the group of physically present and virtually
present participants. Roles will be assigned in advance and by
poll at the time of the tutorial.
Cooperative and Participatory interaction
design: collaborative design
and hands-on construction of several different types of spaces
within a virtual world will be undertaken. Consortium participants
have extensive experience in designing full scale virtual community
spaces, shared information spaces and 3D music soundspaces (please
see http://www.ccon.org for details). Based on past tutorials
we have conducted, we will split the tutorial into teams. Each
team will begin the design session with a brief brainstorming
period, develop it further on paper and whiteboard, present it
briefly to the whole tutorial for critique and then proceed with
the on-line construction of the space and its interfaces. In addition,
certain participants who are not physically present at the tutorial
will be invited to assist the tutorial virtually from their
locations around the world.
Usability testing:
the spaces and interfaces constructed by tutorial participants
will be immediately available to be evaluated by other participants,
either physically present or virtually participating. If there
are facilities to allow the virtual world areas to be visited
by tutorial participants during the remainder of the conference,
more usability testing could be carried out.
Teleworking, CSCW and CSCL:
one key objective of the tutorial is to give participants enough
background in the medium that they can identify possible applications
in cooperative work and distance education. Input from recent
programs at CSCW '96, CHI 96, CHI 97, SIGGRAPH 97 and other conferences
as well as our experiments with a prototype virtual university
will provide some additional food for thought.
World wide web component:
the World Wide Web will play an important part in the tutorial
as a repository for the course notes, step-by-step guides and
extensive background and references for the social and technical
aspects of virtual worlds. All of these materials will be provided
and hosted on the Digitalspace server for a period of time before
and after the tutorial. In this manner, participants can be better
prepared for the tutorial by visiting these web pages in advance.
Links and documentation created during the tutorial can also be
posted on this website to provide participants a valuable follow-up.
Social issues:
the use of special terms, emergent subcultures and norms of community
behavior will be highlighted and will likely be experienced during
the course of the tutorial. Our colleagues have used some ethnographic
techniques to document emergent community in virtual worlds and
this will provide some applicable background.
Learning objective
The learning objective of the tutorial is to
give participants enough background and hands-on experience of
this new medium that they can use on-line inhabited virtual worlds
in their research or professional projects. It is our hope that
the tutorial will also encourage more computer and networking
professionals to participate in the development of the virtual
worlds medium.
How the tutorial will be conducted
Meeting with Professor
Sandy Stone of U.T. Austin in ACTLab Traveler Utopia
The primary instructor will open the tutorial
with a comprehensive computer and video presentation explaining
the origins of the virtual worlds medium. A tour of several virtual
worlds will be given next with the environments run live over
the Internet and projected centrally for the participants. In
the final part of this section, the particular virtual environment
which will be used in the afternoon exercise (Active Worlds, Onlive
Traveler and possibly other environments) will be introduced and
live hands-on experience can begin.
For the design portion, 2 or 3 assigned teams
within the tutorial will gather separately to brainstorm their
given design challenge, using paper and whiteboard. These teams
may opt to create a design document in some presentation format
(web page, powerpoint). At the end of the design section. The
design can be described briefly (5 minutes) to the entire tutorial
for critique.
Hands-on exercises will be conducted initially
by the primary instructor guiding participants to move through
and interact within the virtual environment on their workstation.
The presenter will be running and projecting the same view for
the whole class to reference. At the same time, two or more assistants
will move through the class, providing assistance as needed. During
the collaborative building phase, all attention will focus on
the workstations of team participants, with assistance from virtual
presenters and the physically present instructor.
Schedule of events
Star Wars Tatooine prototype world
If a full day tutorial can be accommodated,
the following schedule of events will be presented. If a half
day tutorial is the only option, another schedule can be offered.
| Time | Event | Tutorial instructor |
| Morning: first 1.5 hour block | Introduction to online virtual worlds, background, terminology, applications. Questions addressed. | Bruce Damer, primary instructor |
| Morning: second 1.5 hour block | Tour of online multi-user virtual worlds projected for participants, hands-on introduction of environment to be used in later exercises. Questions addressed. | Bruce Damer, primary instructor |
| Afternoon: first 1.5 hour block | Brainstorming and paper/whiteboard design of 3-D space to be collaboratively constructed by participants, presentation to whole tutorial | Other participants physically or virtually present |
| Afternoon: second 1.5 hour block | Collaborative construction of space in virtual world. Documentation of efforts | Other participants physically or virtually present |
| Summary: possible additional allotted time, up to 20 minutes | Summarizing results and impressions by polling participants, both physically and virtually present, conclusion of tutorial | Bruce Damer, primary instructor |
Samples of materials to be included in the tutorial notes
Avatars in a virtual Icelandic
street in OZ Virtual
A good representative sample of the materials
to be included in the tutorial notes can be found at: http://www.digitalspace.com/avatars/book/chtu/chtu1.htm
In addition, web-based course notes can be
updated following the conference. In this way, user experiences,
documentation of the designs constructed and other new information
can be provided to participants and the rest of the Internet community.
Other course notes can be provided in the paper
package, including an annotated bibliography and basic introduction
and tour of the medium. Exerpts from the book on the subject written
by the primary instructor can also be provided.
History of the prior tutorials
This tutorial was first given at MediARTech, a large Internet and media conference in Florence Italy, in May of 1996. In addition, the full tutorial or portions of it have been presented at the following venues:
Noteworthy and distinguishing ideas and approaches illustrated
The new medium of multi-user virtual worlds allows a large number of ordinary users of the Internet to construct and interact within a visual digital space. Since early 1995, the number of these environments has grown to several thousand distinct virtual landscapes and the user population has exceeded 250,000. Noteworthy about this medium is that it puts tools into the hands of ordinary Internet users which allow them to build and inhabit collaborative visual community spaces. In effect, it empowers these users to engage in interaction design within the context of a cooperating community. This technology could be seen as a graphical extension of MUD and MOO environments but it exhibits some of its own unique characteristics, including:
Tutorial Presenters
The primary presenter is Bruce Damer, President and CEO of DigitalSpace Corporation and a founding director of the Contact Consortium, a non-profit research membership organization dedicated to the development of the virtual worlds medium. Since 1995 the Consortium has engaged in extensive usability testing of virtual worlds provided by its member companies, which include Intel, Silicon Graphics, Electric Communities, Microsoft, Black Sun Interactive, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (Software Division), Philips, 3D Labs, The Palace, British Telecom, OZ Interactive and others. The Consortium has engaged in the collaborative construction and staffing of a virtual town called Sherwood Forest, a virtual university called TheU, a generative VRML garden called Nerve Garden and has hosted numerous research and discussion groups and regular social experiments in these online worlds. For more information on instructor Bruce Damer, see his Home Page.
Other demonstrators will join us virtually
from around the world as avatars in-world to assist with
teaching, demonstration and participate in the collaborative exercises
themselves.
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