Running head: COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION EXPERIMENT

Collaboration and Communication Experiment: Online Virtual Reality Project Reflections on Second Life Kenneth R. Hubbell East Carolina University

COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION EXPERIMENT Reflections on Second Life After a couple of years hiatus from 3D simulation and virtual worlds, I selected this collaboration and communication experiment to see what advances had been made during my absence. From 1995 to 2009, I developed 3D games, simulations, and virtual environments for several companies including Virtus Corp, Red Storm Entertainment, NxView Technologies,

William Bell Five, Inc., and ViOS where I developed an early competitive predecessor of Linden Labs Second Life with Dr. Julian Lombardi now of Duke University. In particular, my primary interest areas include level of interactivity and overall user experience both independently and as compared to alternative approaches to similar services. These services include collaboration, chat, and media streaming. Photographs from within Second Life Using my previous avatar, Whua Moy, as photographer and a newly created second avatar named KenHubbell, I operated both avatars "in-world" on two different computers to conduct my photo tour. My tour started with the virtual East Carolina University campus followed by teleporting to two other locations.

Figure 1. KenHubbell outside of the East Carolina University EDTC offices. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/East%20Carolina%20University/37/84/25)

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Figure 2. KenHubbell at Dr. Brown's office on the East Carolina University virtual campus. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/East%20Carolina%20University/108/42/41

Figure 3. KenHubbell at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Island. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island/93/83/30

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Figure 4. KenHubbell at The Tech. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Tech/165/165/38

Potential Instructional Uses As far back as 1995, my colleagues and I saw the potential for 3D worlds as training environments. On reflection of my return to Second Life, I am both impressed and disappointed in the level of changes introduced to the multi-user virtual environment over the past two years. At the surface, the online signup process is much easier as I discovered when creating the new account for my second avatar. The installation procedure was also seamless and the team at Linden Labs has definitely improved it for the general computer user. On the negative side, the technology improvements in computer graphic processors, 3D game technology, and Internet browsing and streaming the texture mapping and scene polygon complexity have only provided slightly better performance than I experienced in 2009.

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Remarkably, the Second Life network system remembered my previous location from the last time I visited Second Life two years ago. For my new avatar, the welcome area and tutorials are much better than when I first joined in 2006. In both cases, Linden Labs marginally improved the general navigation interface with upgrades mostly being in the areas chat. I did run into a few difficulties with my old account. In the previous version of the software, the user maintained a separate first and last name for login. Second Life has now replaced this with a single name. Unfortunately, the developers neglected to put a note indicating that older users should just put the first and last name with a space in the name field. While not a huge issue for hackers like myself, I know many adult learners who would have tried once and then bailed on the technology. Another issue was in the area of avatar appearance. Not only were some of my clothing assets no longer available, the process for editing my avatars experience was not as intuitive as I remembered. The menu structure was confusing when compared to other virtual world platforms like Dungeons and Dragons Online (2011) and Neverwinter Nights 2 (2007). As seen in the photo section of this paper, I chose three distinct locations to visit. The first was the office of Dr. Abbie Brown, the second was the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Island, and the third was The Tech Island, a museum dedicated to showcasing innovation located in the real world city of San Jose. Interestingly enough, when I arrived at The Tech Island, I recognized the building from a photo I had taken while attending the 2011 ASTD Tech Conference. Again, one of the strengths of Second Life is the level of detail users can build into an environment if enough time and resources are spent. It was wonderful to see how well the modelers were able to replicate the structure in Second Life.

COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION EXPERIMENT Where the visual aspects of the virtual worlds were excellent once all of the assets had loaded, the user experience in many other respects was poor. In most areas there was little to no interactive experiences. Moreover, with the exception of a few artificial intelligence avatars, there was almost no one else at the locations I visited. I did run into one tour guide who

unfortunately got lost while trying to guide me to a demonstration. This latter issue is one of the leading issues faced by users of Second Life. How do they find what they are looking for? Even the search functionality failed to determine where some key islands are located - including the ASTD site. Putting all the development and creative issues aside, the primary use I see from a training perspective is spacial environment orientation and product familiarization. Tying in nicely with the idea of contrived environments as described by B.F. Skinner (B. F. Skinner, 2010, section 3) and the experiential nature of the virtual world as relates to the constructivist approach, Second Life should be an ideal tool for immersing the learner at least spacially. The target audience demographics for this type of technology ages 5 to 50 depending on their prior use of any type of gaming technology. Based on 15 years developing 3D simulations and games, my research has shown the primary difficulty is in navigating 3D space, although with some of the graphical interfacing, Second Life has made this process easier. As for other features of the system, while Second Life supports video streaming and group presentations, there are more efficient tools for this including LiveMeeting, Elluminate, WebEx and other collaboration tools. From a social gathering space, Facebook and LinkedIn accomplish this more broadly with a focus on all things social and include mobile access for constant contact. My opinion is that immersive 3D will remain a novelty until the learner only has to focus on the learning. This will

COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION EXPERIMENT require reaching a level of technical sophistication similar to the Star Trek style holodeck where user navigation is as natural as functioning in the real world.

References B. F. Skinner. (2010). Wikiquote. Retrieved from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited interactive video game. (2011). Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Retrieved from https://trial.turbine.com/ddo.php?ftui=DDODefault& Neverwinter Nights 2. (2007). BioWare. Retrieved from http://nwn.bioware.com/