[chisigmail] IDG Seminars: 'Voice in Virtual Worlds' and 'Collaborative Building in Second Life'

[Daryl Ku]

(Apologies for cross posting)

You are cordially invited to two Interaction Design Group seminars.


SEMINAR 1
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PRESENTER:
Greg Wadley, Interaction Design Group, University of Melbourne

TITLE:	
PhD Completion Seminar: Voice in Virtual Worlds

VENUE:
University of Melbourne, IDEA Lab, Level 4, 111 Barry Street, Carlton

DATE and TIME:
Friday 31 Jul 2009, 3.00 - 3.45 pm

ABSTRACT:
For his PhD, Greg has conducted four studies of communication in online virtual environments, focusing on voice and text modalities and how these interact with three-dimensionality, multiple contexts, and fluid identity. The studies included ethnographies of voice use in MMORPGs and Second Life, and studies of collaboration at large and small scales of virtual distance. Greg's website contains some publications from these studies. This talk will run from 3.00 to 3:45 pm, including time for discussion.

BIO:
Greg is a PhD candidate in the Interaction Design Group at the University of Melbourne, supervised by Martin Gibbs and Steve Howard. He plans to submit his thesis this year.
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SEMINAR 2
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PRESENTER:
Greg Wadley, Interaction Design Group, University of Melbourne

TITLE:
Collaborative Building in Second Life

VENUE:
University of Melbourne, IDEA Lab, Level 4, 111 Barry Street, Carlton

DATE and TIME:
Friday 31 Jul 2009, 3.50 - 4.15 pm

ABSTRACT:
Greg will preview a talk he is giving at ECSCW09 on collaboration around objects in Second Life. This study, conducted at PARC in 2008, re-enacted classic 'quasi-experiments' into problems of reference to objects and places. The detachable camera feature of SL makes it especially hard to deduce a collaborator's focus of attention via their avatar's gaze or gesture; yet users discovered interesting ways to directly refer to locations. This talk will run from 3.50 to 4:15 pm, including time for discussion.

The paper is "The 'out-of-avatar experience': object-focused collaboration in Second Life" by Greg Wadley and Nicolas Ducheneaut.
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Please forward to others if interested. All are Welcome.
http://www.dis.unimelb.edu.au/research/groups/interactiondesign/seminars.html

-- 
Daryl Ku
PhD Candidate & Interaction Design Group Coordinator

Interaction Design Group
Department of Information Systems
Room 4.65, ICT Building
University of Melbourne
+61 3 834 41516
s.ku at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au