Aaron Parker
aaronp.meResearch.
The Future of Telecommunications (from 1969).
In the late 60s and early 70s, most telecommunication companies were hard at work developing technology they believed would be as successful as the telephone. They were enamored by a vision of the future that was filled with home-video conferencing, remote computing services, and telecommuting. Produced by The Post Office in 1969, this short film…
2012
Attitudes towards video conferencing at Sun Microsystems.
Here’s something interesting, two reports about attitudes towards video conferencing at Sun Microsystems during the 90s. Tang and Isaacs (1993): Generally positive attitudes, system was so popular that it was difficult getting it booked. Henderson and Henderson (2009, reflecting on user attitudes in the late 90s): “It was common belief at Sun that videoconferencing was horrible,…2011
Is Gamification Sexist?.
Gamification is everywhere at the moment. People from all across the internet are blogging and tweeting about how anything and everything can be made better just by making it more game-like. The premise is simple, games are fun and engaging, therefore anything game-like will be fun and engaging too. It’s a dubious claim, but it’s one…2011
Meaning, prims, and sense-making mechanisms.
Last night I visited @sorornishi’s Second Life art exhibit, Transubstantiation. I’d read an interesting blog post on it by @botgirlq (who’s Machinima I thoroughly recommend you check out!) so thought I’d drop by. As beautiful as it is, one thing I found particularly intriguing was the philosophy behind it. Soror writes: “The Prim contains my body and my…2011
Empathy declines in students, possibly due to social networking.
According to a meta-analysis that’s due to be published in Personality and Social Psychology Review next month, college students are much less empathic than they were twenty years ago. Reviewing 72 samples taken between 1979 and 2009, Sara Konrath and colleagues showed that when it comes to concern for others and ability to see things from…2011
Community Memory, The First Social Network.
When it comes to the origin of digital social networking, I guess most people will think about the services popular just after the turn of millennium. Yet, social networks have been around for far longer — in fact, according to a recent Radio 4 documentary, the earliest comes not from the nineties, or even the eighties, but 1973. Named…2011
Virtual World Design Guidelines Courtesy of Microsoft.
Between 1995 and 2001, Microsoft developed and operated it’s own social virtual world. Named V-Chat, the service allowed users to create their own text-based, 2D, or 3D environments in which they could chat and interact with other users. In it’s six years of active service, V-Chat saw two major iterations, an active end-user community numbering…2010
Second Life as a Product of the Mind.
Back in the 1970s, towards the end of the research flurry where communication systems were being heavily studied by both the British Post Office and the US Government, Short and colleagues (1977) made referrence to an idea they termed social presence. Their theory was that all forms of communication varied in the degree to which…2010
Virtual World Research.
Up until now, most of my blog posts have been fairly opinionated errr… reflections on various things, events, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing these things — and I have every intention on carrying on with them — but for a blog that was originally meant to be about research it’s kind of been a little low…2010
My Lab — The Toeda Research Centre.
One of the most important things when it comes to doing Second Life research is having somewhere to do it (d’uh XD). I guess interviews could feasibly be done in public places, or at the humble abodes of your participants, but more experimental stuff really needs its own dedicated lab. So for this post I’m going…2009
