In the lecture by professor McLeod, we experimented with “Second Life,” a virtual reality computer program. I had never heard of Second Life so this lecture was particularly interesting to me. The program seems to facilitate collaboration in many ways, but upon second thought, it has its drawbacks also.
Some benefits of Second Life are that users can control where they look. Each avatar on second life can monitor what part of the virtual world he wants to see. Second life is also helpful for users to develop a sense of identity. When creating a Second Life account, users make a conscious choice about what they look and act like; a user can chose to be 7 ft tall or a completely different species. In addition to looking different, users on Second Life can act differently than they do in the real world. Users can experiment with different personalities to see which works the best for different scenarios. Finally, Second Life provides good workspace and presence awareness. For example, you can really see if other members of your group are busy and what activity they are involved in.
On the contrary, Second Life also has many drawbacks. First of all, Second Life is a very complex program that is very difficult to adopt. The article from “Place and Time” stated that Second Life has a very high learning curve. Also, Second Life does not represent people accurately. As I mentioned earlier, people can be completely different species so trust may be difficult to establish. In addition, Second Life has no time zone, so it would be difficult to determine which time zone it operates on. Also dealing with time, Second Life’s days are only four hours. Common ground is difficult to establish via Second Life because users might not be at their computers and go “afk,” meaning they are temporarily unavailable (Place and Time, 108). Thus establishing a common, shared understanding might be difficult. Finally if members chose not to use the voice feature and type instead, they won’t be able to use their hands for something and communicate at the same time.
After analyzing the benefits and drawbacks, it seems second life would work very well in a chemistry class, where learning 3D structures is crucial, or in a situation where it’s important to have presence awareness. On the contrary, Second Life would work poorly in a situation where users do not use the voice feature and are distributed. For example, if one member is working on a space station, he won’t be able to type and use his hands at the same time.
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I agree with what you said about the potential uses for second life. I also think a big part of how helpful it would be depends on the coupling required for the tasks that you're trying to accomplish.
ReplyDeleteAs Olson and Teasley (1996) designated, coupling involves two factors: "how immediate a response is needed, and how much interaction is required for either clarification or persuasion."
I would imagine that most collaborative tasks that are actually helped by having an avatar would require immediate responses between collaborators. It wouldn't really make sense to customize a 3D avatar and to log into a virtual world in order to just give group members quick updates.
Having an avatar probably helps with persuasion or clarification too, since one could simulate motions and refer to objects (through the use of scripts and primitives) in the game.