New Book Release - The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments

Courtesy of Ralph Schroeder

Ralph Schroeder, Professor at Chalmers University in Sweden, has just edited a book about people's social behaviour in virtual worlds. 'The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments'(Springer is the Publisher, publication 2002, available in all good online book shops!)is a collection of 12 essays on this topic, more than half of which deal directly with Activeworlds. Several chapters also deal with other online worlds such as V-Chat and Worldsaway, and all will be of interest to Activeworlds citizens and tourists who would like to find out how social scientists, social psychologist, architects, computer scientists and others analyze what is going on in online virtual worlds.

Preface
Ralph Schroeder

1. Social Interaction in Virtual Environments: Key Issues, Common Themes, and a Framework for Research
Ralph Schroeder, Chalmers University

2. Social Conventions in Computer-Mediated-Communication: A Comparison of Three Online Shared Virtual Environments
Barbara Becker, Paderborn University and Gloria Mark, University of California Irvine

3. Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds
T.L. Taylor, University of North Carolina

4. Rest in Peace, Bill the Bot: Death and Life in Virtual Worlds
Mikael Jakobsson, Malmö University

5. 30 Days in Activeworlds - Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World
Andrew Hudson-Smith, Bartlett School, University College London

6. Lessons Learned: Building and Deploying Shared Virtual Environments
Lili Cheng, Shelly Farnham, and Linda Stone, Microsoft Research

7. The Long-term Uses of Shared Virtual Environments: An Exploratory Study
Ilona Heldal, Alexander Nilsson, Ralph Schroeder, and Ann-Sofie Axelsson, Chalmers University

8. Social Influence within Immersive Virtual Environments
Jim Blascovich, University of California Santa Barbara

9. Meeting People Virtually: Experiments in Shared Virtual Environments
Mel Slater and Anthony Steed, University College London

10. Colloboration in Multi-Modal Virtual Worlds
Eva-Lotta Sallnäs, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

11. The Digital Divide - Status Differences in Virtual Environments
Ann-Sofie Axelsson, Chalmers University

12. The Social Life of Small Graphical Chat Spaces
Marc Smith, Shelly Farnham and Steven Drucker, Microsoft Research