Liveblogging MetaverseU: TL Taylor, Jeremy Bailenson, Kari Kraus

The second day of MetaverseU had much more of the University in it. While the first day certainly had an academic bent, it also featured  discussions of technology developments, products, and practices. TL Taylor led the second day with a discussion of online embodiment, ranging across game and social worlds. Jeremy Bailenson took a more quantitative approach, quickly running through 9 experiments and studies, looking at identity, avatars, and persuasion. (Amazing and fast!) Kari Kraus then took the stage to look at how people are approaching the preservation of virtual worlds.

Avatar Embodiment

Taylor opened with the classic cartoon: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The comic is old, but she believes there still hasn’t been a strong enough discussion on identity, especially crossing between the game and social worlds.

“My point is not to tell an entirely linear story,” she said. “We still have MUDs after all, but to get us talking about the connection between the corporeal and digital body. My hope is to quickly raise some issues of what I call ‘digital materiality’ and what it means to be constantly delegating out to our avatars.”

Taylor went to MMOs after noticing similarities between them and virtual worlds. There’s difference, to be sure, but still a bridge.

“There are a variety of ways people experience, use, and feel about their avatars: as a method to e xperiment and play; sometimes are just tools to navigate a space; people I’ve talked to over the years talk about a ‘quest for fidelity to make my avatar more like me’; and for some people avatars are ‘truer reflections’ of how they feel about themselves.”

Many people don’t fix on simply one form of embodiment either.  Often we discuss avatars as individuals, but Taylor says avatars are often defined socially.

“Just as in offline life our avatars are described in social contexts, and those contexts inscribe them with meaning,” she said. “And it’s important to note in the offline world that bodies are sometimes seen as privileged or unprivileged. It’s important to think how that affects the online world.”

It’s no secret that online users treat each other differently based on avatar appearance. It’s one of the main forms of expression. Alternatively, citing examples across classic games and recent actions in WoW, avatars are tools for expression more physically: griefing, protest, etc.

“Avatars can form a powerful hook when people start thinking of themselves as citizens of worlds,” Taylor explained. “And when you start to see protests going on in-world, I think it’s clear something big is going on.”

That embodiment, according to Taylor, comes through practicing presence and social interaction. That doesn’t mean Taylor thinks we should leave the corporeal world for the virtual. “There are multiple bodies in multiple social contexts,” she said.  “And we haven’t figured out that bleed across.”

There are people who claim their digital persona isn’t connected to their real lives, though.

“I’ve interviewd people like that, and I’m not sure how sustainable it is,” Taylor said. “I think the trend is to combine the two. I’m willing to grant a lot of credibility to people and how they experience things and how they say they experience things, though.”

Taylor closed with a couple of critical issues to look at: the commoditization and commercialization of embodiment, the conversation of technology and accessibility, mapping gestures and movement when people are having conversations across multiple channels (and using empirical grounding to drive technology instead of “sexy dreams”), and, of course, IP and the question of who owns avatars.

9 VR Experiments

Bailenson builds immersive virtual realities to study how people use it, but his focus is in social science.

His focus isn’t on 3D avatars specifically, but on any digital representation of the self (3D avatars, jpeg pictures, voices, gesture recognitions, pattern tracking, etc.: “Any representation of a human made up of 1s and 0s.”) He does work with high-tech avatars made from high-detail photos with deep fidelity—the judicial system supports the use of them in line-ups—but the group also works to make the avatars gesture like the individual. Tie that into an intuitive, helmet-based system, and you get high presence that can be put in the same collaborative virtual environment.

“Transformed Social Interaction” is the idea that instead of sending an actual behavior over, users send a filtered idea of a strategic behavior that creates the transformed social interaction. (More info on all here.)

1. Augmented Gaze: In the physical world, people can only send information in one direction. In the virtual world, users can send their gaze to everyone in the room.  When trying to send artificial gaze to everyone at once: 1)everyone saw it as a real gaze and not artififcial, 2) everyone found it unpleasant to be constantly singled out, but 3) they return the gaze more often, and 4) they are more likely to be persuaded to sign off an unpopular policies.
2. Digital chameleon: people love to be subtly mimicked (or they love themselves). It’s a powerful sales/interview/wait staff technique. In VR, the lab can take the gestures from the subject, reinterpret them to map them on the researcher’s avatar’s movement, and map them back on to mirror the subject.  Findings: 1) less than 5% of subjects detect the slow, bad algorithm mirror, 2)you become better liked and more persuasive. And all the tracking data could be stored in virtual worlds, making sales avatars potentially incredibly persusasive.
a. The lab did similar experiments with old haptic machines, giving people their own handshakes back. Subjects are much more susceptible to financial negotiations then.
3. Facial identity capture: The lab used cheap software to meld facial images. The group acquired photographs before the 2004 election. They presented subjects with images of the candidates blended subtly with themselves. 30-40% is the magic number where not a single person (out of about 2500 subjects) can detect their own photograph morphed in. “That’s extremely powerful and scary data,” said Bailenson. Win the self is morphed with Kerry, a week before the national election, Kerry won in a landslide. The study has been replicated three times.
4. Transforming social perception: The lab wanted to train teachers to spread their gaze equally. Avatars would turn translucent if not looked at (students would disappear completely). With normal gaze, people in corners get ignored 40% of the time, with the tool, it goes down to about zero and learning increases.
5. Sharing body spaces: It’s rare to get people to share body spaces in VR space because it’s uncomfortable, but when done in teaching tai chi virtually, it makes it a potential learning experience.
6. Scaling avatars: As you move in a physical world, the avatar loses weight in the virtual world. When you show the demonstration, people work out 15x as long in the lab as in control conditions. Tracked 24 hours later, they worked out 1 hour more than in control condition.
7. Transfored proximity, angles and distance: There’s a sweet spot in rooms where you learn better, about 10% better on a test. In VR there’s no reason you can’t all sit in the sweet spot.  You can increase learning by magnitudes for distance learning.

Ethics: “This is kind of scary stuff. It’s so easy to do and so powerful. This all happens below the radar in terms of perception.”
1. The Proteus effect:  We put you in front of a virtual mirror and people move and gesture for about 20 minutes. When there’s a behavioural tie, it takes about a second to make people think it’s them (even when looking like someone else). The subject looks in the mirror at themselves for about 90 seconds, turns around and sees someone else.
a. Measuring attractiveness: you’ll look the confederate in the eye more, etc.
b. Height: if ten centimeters taller, you’ll lose in negotiation
c. Race: no findings presented
d. Age: they age your face and people will change savings behavior when wearing older avatar
e. This transfers to face-to-face interactions. When taken out of the VR study and giving an online dating form after being shown that you have an attractive avatar, users pick more attractive online potential dates than they would otherwise. (Confidence boost!)
2. The Big ONE: 90 students spend 8 hours per week in second life and lok at four avatar conditions (height, age, something else) and monitors all their behavior online. They then monitor behavior offline and their changes in attitude. The data is being collected right now to see how avatars affect identity.

Avatar and Anima: Preserving the Mixed Economy of Real Life and Second Life

“Anima” is the “first novel” composed entirely in-world, as a term to describe the owner of an avatar, which is otherwise the representation of the human in-world.

Klaus is interested in the conceptual efforts to preserve virtual worlds.

“There’s a tendency to think of Second Life as a hermetically sealed, balkanized environment, whereas yesterday we were all taking it for granted that it bleeds over into the real world,” she said.

The shape of the structure, then, is a Klein Bottle, a surface without a clear inside and outside. For example, yesterday we saw the feed of the presentation in-world broadcast on stage, and avatars inside wanted even more recursion.

Right now, mixed reality has a lot of definitions. People can dress up as their  avatars, dress their avatars up like themselves, buy real versions of their Second Life bling, and more.

There are roadblocks, though, to preserving mixed reality, said Klaus:
1. Our systems of scholarly citations are broken (the MLA’s got nothing to reference YouTube videos referencing each other or mixed-reality art). “Citations provide a set of breadcrumbs to find content and locate it,” said Klaus.
2. Outworld and inworld objects are governed by different IP regimes. “We’ve suddenly woken up to the fact that copyright is being superceded by contract law,” said Klaus. “we don’t yet fully understand what our statuatory rights are.”
3. Our linking norms are still primarily location-based rather than object-based. “This goes to what I would call a librarian primitive,” said Klaus. “The ability to reference and cross-reference objects. If you’re storing a letter and map in different places that are related, you might have a note in the map case referencing the letter elsewhere. It’s a crude step, but relationships across worlds are predicated on creating links between objects. URLs  are not persistent across time and space and are thus less stable than the alternatives of object-based linking.”

The Library of Congress recently began attempting to preserve video games and virtual worlds. A spoof email went around headed “Library of Congress CopyBot is Preserving Virtual Worlds.”

“Copying is so central to preservation that it’s been codified as a principle,” said Klaus. “Lots of copies makes things safer. In my bleaker moments, I read this as saying that the future of preservation is in the hands of pirates, not librarians, because we’re so stymied by the question of copying.”

For example, the NY Philharmonic had to buy back pirated copies of its older performances once it got serious about preserving its work. Likewise, William Gibson released a multi-platform work, “Agrippa,” with a floppy disk in a book. When inserted, it would scroll a poem and then erase it permanently. Librarians didn’t figure out how to register the copyright, but pirates transcribed the poem and posted it to a prominent bulletin board.

To preserve work, more theorists are recommending to allow copying instead of trying to prevent it.

In the physical copy of “Anima,” readers can edit the book, dog ear pages, resell it, and adapt it for their own needs. It’s protected by fair use and rulings from the early 20th century. Copyright controllers can’t rule what happens after the first sale of the object.

In Second Life content, there’s a permissions system that overrides first sale principles. [And, my personal note, let’s not forget DRM, games copyrights, and everything else complicated about pretty much all electronic media not covered by Creative Commons, abandonware, or open-source licenses.]

There are efforts, like the BlueBook Project, designed to make it easier to integrate and preserve mixed-reality work, but there’s no set answer yet.

When asked if anything made her optimistic, Klaus responded “I’m interested in the copyright issues because as someone with a humanities background I have a great love for literature and art. The last thing I want is to alienate the content creators of Second Life by suggesting they give up all their permissions, but I’ve studied this long enough to know that that will have long-term implications for the preservation of this work. Just as we’ve found balance in the physical world, I have hope we’ll find balance in the digital world.”