University of Otago logo. Computer and Information Science Seminars

Seminar Homepage

Speaker:

Stephen Cranefield, Department of Information Science

Title:

Monitoring Social Expectations in Second Life

Location:

Archway 2 - 1:00 pm, Friday 2 October

Abstract:

Online virtual worlds such as Second Life provide a rich medium for unstructured human interaction in a shared simulated 3D environment. However, many human interactions take place in a structured social context where participants play particular roles and are subject to expectations governing their behaviour, and current virtual worlds do not provide any support for this type of interaction. There is therefore an opportunity to adapt the tools developed in the multi-agent systems research community for structured social interactions between software agents (inspired by human society) and adapt these for use with the computer-mediated human communication provided by virtual worlds

This talk will describe the application of one such tool for use with Second Life. A model checker for online monitoring of social expectations defined in temporal logic has been integrated with Second Life, allowing users to be notified when their expectations of others have been fulfilled or violated. Avatar actions in the virtual world are detected by a script, encoded as propositions and sent to the model checker, along with the social expectation rules to be monitored. Notifications of expectation fulfilment and violation are returned to the script to be displayed to the user.

Last modified: Thursday, 01-Oct-2009 14:35:48 NZDT

This page is maintained by the seminar list administrator.