Playing the e-business game in 3D virtual worlds

Purpose– This paper examines the three-dimensional (3D)virtual world users’ perceptions of authenticity and trustworthiness in the virtual prototypes and users’ potential purchase behavior in the real-world settings. The 3D virtual worlds provide a new platform that exhibits virtual prototypes as a promotion channel for new products of real-world and online service, where users can communicate “face to face” via their representative avatars.Design/methodology/approach– The authors conducted an experiment in Second Life and collected data in a post-study questionnaire to test our proposed conceptual model. Structural equation modeling was the main methodology.Findings– The research results showed that 3D virtual world users obtained a high sense of telepresence and social presence. The sense of telepresence positively leads to users’ perceptions of online trust in the virtual prototypes and thus increases their intention to purchase real-world objects; the users’ sense of social presence positively associates to their perceptions of authenticity and online trust and, therefore, their purchase intention.Research limitations/implications– In survey research, the common method variance is a problem. A more robust way is to use objective measures.Practical implications– A new channel was proposed for businesses to enhance their online strategies that will increase their business value.Social implications– 3D virtual world is also a cutting-edge platform for remote education, public information service, etc.Originality/value– This paper initially contributes to the literature that interprets underlying factors in 3D virtual worlds associated to purchase intention in real-world objects. We demonstrated the advantages, i.e. the communication efficacy and vivid virtual design in the 3D user-generated environment.

3D virtual worlds are networked environments designed using the metaphor of architecture. Recent developments in 3D virtual worlds focus on interactivity, flexibility and adaptability. Rather than creating virtual environments in which the objects have intelligent behaviours, our research takes a different approach to develop an agent model that is associated with an individual person in the 3D virtual world as a personal design agent. This paper presents a Generative Design Agent (GDA), a kind of rational agent capable of representing a person in a virtual world and designing, implementing and demolishing 3D virtual places based on the occupants’ current needs in the virtual world. The core of a GDA’s design component is a generative design grammar that is able to capture a style of 3D virtual worlds. 3D virtual worlds designed using the GDA model is another kind of architecture for the “moment”.

The proliferation of the Internet and other technological innovations has transformed the structure of the tourism industry as well as affected how tourism destinations are perceived and consumed. The 3D virtual world provides opportunities for destination marketing organizations to communicate with targeted markets by offering a rich environment for potential visitors to explore tourism destinations. However, as of yet, there is little understanding about how to effectively market tourism destinations to virtual world participants who are technology users as well as potential consumers. The purpose of the present study is to develop a research framework that integrates the technology acceptance model (TAM) and self‐determination theory to understand how tourists use a 3D virtual world. Primary data were obtained for this study through self‐administered Web questionnaires. The data were conducted in a laboratory setting with 186 participants. This study contributes to the empirical TAM literature by applying the model to a 3D virtual tourism site. Additionally, this study provides a research framework to capture the entertainment nature of a 3D virtual world by extending the TAM to incorporate psychological elements of self‐determination theory to understand consumer experience. From the perspective of tourism professionals, this study contributes to an understanding of how best to construct informative and interactive tourist destinations in 3D virtual worlds to attract potential online and real‐world tourists. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Within most architecture and design schools, 3D virtual worlds are traditionally perceived and used as a CAAD tool for modelling and collaboration. Building on the understanding of virtual worlds as the extension of our physical environments where people can inhabit and participate in a variety of activities, we teach designing virtual worlds as a design subject which considers 3D virtual worlds as a different kind of environment design other than a technical tool for supporting design simulation and collaboration. This paper reports on our teaching experience, as well as discusses the principles for designing and teaching in 3D virtual worlds.

This project seeks to demonstrate the use of remote experimentation and 3D virtual environments applied to the teaching-learning in the areas of exact sciences-physics. In proposing the combination of remote experimentation and 3D virtual worlds in teaching-learning process, we intend to achieve greater geographic coverage, contributing to the construction of new methodologies of teaching support, speed of access and foremost motivation for students to continue in scientific study of the technology areas. The proposed architecture is based on a model implemented fully featured open source and open hardware. The virtual world was built in OpenSim software and integrated it a remote physics experiment called “electrical panel”. Accessing the virtual world the user has total control of the experiment within the 3D virtual world.

This research investigates engineering design teams’ performance of a concept selection task in three meeting spaces: face-to-face, 2D online and 3D virtual world. Cisco Systems’ WebEx and Sun Microsystems’ Wonderland were used as the 2D online meeting space and the 3D virtual world, respectively. Twenty-four two-person design teams were formed and randomly assigned to one of the three meeting spaces. The teams performed a cell-phone concept selection task in the meeting space to which they were assigned. Four dependent variables were measured: task completion time, team satisfaction, self-evaluated process quality and expert-evaluated process quality. Following data collection, one-way ANOVA was used to analyze each variable to determine the differences, if any, among the meeting spaces. ANOVA results did not support rejection of the null hypothesis for any variable. These results suggest that 3D virtual worlds support design concept selection as well as 2D online meeting spaces and that both of these te...

Although teachers play an important role in preventing school bullying, there is a lack of educational programs to enhance the competencies of pre-service teachers regarding how to prevent and address school bullying. To improve the knowledge and self-efficacy of pre-service teachers about school-bullying challenges, this study developed an authentic problem solving activity in a 3D virtual world on the basis of activity theory. In this study, for four weeks, 36 pre-service teachers collaboratively solved school-bullying problems, conducted role-plays in a virtual world, and reflected on their activities. As a result, the participants significantly improved their knowledge (restorative justice) and self-efficacy to handle school bullying. This study also investigated the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the activity through analyzing quantitative and qualitative data with an activity system framework. The findings were discussed to improve the design of the problem-solving activity in the context of Korean pre-service teacher education.

On the Web and on informatics systems, 3D virtual worlds used become big both in number and in size. Therefore, we propose in this paper a new method for retrieving 3D virtual worlds based on the semantics and the content. Firstly, we propose a new classified database of 3D virtual worlds given in VRML format. To achieve the semantic method, we construct an ontology that describes virtual worlds in various aspects including their contents (3D objects building a virtual world) and information about their contents (authors, file format, etc). This ontology is presented by OWL, the W3C recommended language. So as to extract desired 3D scenes from the proposed database we use the SPARQL query language. We propose finally a shape based method for searching desired virtual worlds by content in this database. This method is based on a new distance (metric) that define the similarity between virtual worlds. This method is evaluated using the recall vs. precision curves.

Over the past three years (2006–2008), the medical/health and public health communities have shown a growing interest in using online 3D virtual worlds like Second Life® (http://secondlife.com/) for health education, community outreach, training and simulations purposes. 3D virtual worlds are seen as the precursors of ‘Web 3D’, the next major iteration of the Internet that will follow in the coming years. This paper provides a tour of several flagship Web 3D experiences in Second Life®, including Play2Train Islands (emergency preparedness training), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—CDC Island (public health), Karuna Island (AIDS support and information), Tox Town at Virtual NLM Island (US National Library of Medicine - environmental health), and Jefferson’s Occupational Therapy Center. We also discuss the potential and future of Web 3D. These are still early days of 3D virtual worlds, and there are still many more untapped potentials and affordances of 3D virtual worlds that are yet to be explored, as the technology matures further and improves over the coming months and years.

Education is incorporating more and more of the capabilities provided by the Internet. One such move is the incorporation of 3D virtual worlds in the learning environment. Another is the increasing development of multiagent systems that support the learner or the tutor. Integrating pedagogically based multiagent systems with 3D virtual worlds could provide a more engaging immersive learning environment. This paper explores the feasibility of integrating a 3D virtual world with a pedagogical multiagent system named QuizMASter, an educational game for elearning that helps students learn their course material through friendly competition. The integration was developed by devising, implementing and testing an approach using open source technologies, namely, Open Wonderland and JADE. The result is encouraging as the integration is technically feasible, not overly difficult and opens a door to further integration opportunities.

3D virtual worlds are potent digital ecosystems because the 3D interface simulates real-world environments and the community of users creates a dynamic, real-to-life economy and in-world culture. Some virtual worlds such as Second Life empower users to generate in-world content through object building tools and programming languages; indeed the content in Second Life is entirely user-generated. This promotes a rich culture of innovation surrounding this emerging technology that continually develops the capabilities of the 3D digital ecosystem. The collaborative culture spans both the 3D in-world environment and 2D ecosystems: for example, Web 2.0 applications such as wikis and blogs facilitate support, discussion, and documentation for user-generated innovations. Innovation in 3D digital ecosystems such as Second Life are applied to all domains of human endeavour that exist in the real-world, including recreation, socialisation, commerce, and education. This paper shares the authorspsila professional experience using Second Life in tertiary information systems/science education. Case studies describe the specific applications. They are followed by discussion of the benefits of 3D digital ecosystems for education and suggestions for future research, development, and practice.

In hopes of finding an appropriate way to integrate virtual worlds into Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), this paper introduces a 3D virtual platform for language education set up by OpenSimulator and Moodle. The resulting 3D virtual world can not only create a graphic immersive context for students to practice language use, but also offer teachers a better management tool to keep student records and teaching content. Furthermore, some teaching aids and learning tools are developed to support language learning and teaching, and three types of task-based instructional activities are designed to offer an appropriate, appealing and meaningful context where the target language can be acquired naturally with less anxiety. We hope that the 3D virtual world can be an option for the English classroom to provide students an input-rich and immersive environment where learning can be fun.KeywordsComputer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)virtual worldssimulation and gameOpenSimulator (OpenSim)Moodle

Electronic Institution are regulated environments populated by autonomous software agents that perform tasks on behalf of users. Users, however, are reluctant in delegating full control of critical decisions to agents and prefer to make them on their own. In order to increase trust in agents we propose 3D Electronic Institutions as an environment inhabited by a heterogenous society of humans and agents. We present a novel approach that introduces humans to Electronic Institutions via 3D Virtual Worlds. Such a 3D Virtual World provides an immersive user interface that allows humans to observe the behavior of their agents as well as the intervention in the agents' decision process if necessary. We step beyond the agents view on Electronic Institutions, take a human-centered perspective and concentrate on the relation between humans and agents in the amalgamation of 3D Electronic Institutions.

For many millions of users, 3D virtual worlds provide an engaging, immersive experience heightened by a synergistic combination of visual realism with dynamic control of the user’s movement within the virtual world. For individuals with visual or dexterity impairments, however, one or both of those synergistic elements are impacted, reducing the usability and therefore the utility of the 3D virtual world. This article considers what features are necessary to make virtual worlds usable by such individuals. Empirical work has been based on a multiplayer 3D virtual world game called PowerUp, to which we have built in an extensive set of accessibility features. These features include in-world navigation and orientation tools, font customization, self-voicing text-to-speech output, key remapping options, and keyboard-only and mouse-only navigation. Through empirical work with legally blind teenagers and adults with cerebral palsy, these features have been refined and validated. Whereas accessibility support for users with visual impairment often revolves around keyboard navigation, these studies emphasized the need to support visual aspects of pointing device actions too. Other notable findings include use of speech to supplement sound effects for novice users, and, for those with cerebral palsy, a general preference to use a pointing device to look around the world, rather than keys or on-screen buttons. The PowerUp accessibility features provide a core level of accessibility for the user groups studied.

This paper discusses aspects of Information and Communications Technologies and how they have influenced our daily lives, especially our educational models. Despite the technological advances, the lack of interest of young people for science and technology careers increases and it is even more worsened by the fact that an extremely small number of schools have science and computer labs in Brazil. Moreover, some educational models have emerged in last decades contributing to teaching and learning process, and we discuss especially those which include remote experimentation and 3D virtual worlds, whose goal is to provide immersive learning environment with real experiments for students.