No description available.

This study investigated the development of trust between strangers interacting via avatars in virtual worlds. The first part of the study analyzed perceived trustworthiness based on the visual appearance of avatars; the second part makes observations of two strangers self-disclosing information via avatars in a virtual world; the third part analyzed an experimental situation of two individuals interacting via avatars, where avatar appearance was changed and participants were recruited based on their experience with interacting with others via avatars. Findings showed that perceived trustworthiness does vary based on the visual appearance of the avatar. A positive relationship was found for self-disclosure and experience, in that those who have previously chosen to participate in a virtual world were more likely to share more detailed information about themselves. Non-significant differences in self-disclosure were found for avatar appearance; however, experience in using virtual worlds was significantly different for the willingness to share information before engaging in a task: experienced participants shared more information than inexperienced participants. This suggests that self-disclosure might be influenced by appearance at the point of formation in that the experienced are willing to overlook the avatar, and less so when there are other sources of information to base trust-behavior on (Altman & Taylor, 1973; Nowak & Rauh, 2006). Recommendations were made for modifications for similar experiments trying to validate an objective measure of trust, and for continued research in the development of trust between strangers interacting via avatars.

Orientador: Cristiane Pereira Dias / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem e Laboratório de Estudos Avançados em Jornalismo / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-27T09:28:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Pequeno_Vitor_M.pdf: 1673328 bytes, checksum: 6c971150145b2aa5951e0bc1f9c7e58f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: Essa pesquisa centrou suas investigações sobre as redes de relacionamento como dispositivos tecnológicos de comunicação e estabelecimento das relações sociais. Por meio da apropriação e aplicação de diversos dispositivos teóricos da teoria discursiva e do materialismo histórico, buscou analisar aspectos técnicos dessas redes como produções de cunho ideológico, desconstruindo as formulações de sujeito, relação social e circulação do sentido implícitas em sua estruturação. Essa pesquisa também se apoiou fortemente no método filosófico de Jean Baudrillard para repensar certas operações nocionais de dualização, principalmente no caso de online e off-line, e sua relevância, tanto epistêmica, quanto social, na contemporaneidade. Nos apropriamos aqui da noção de Arquivo como princípio ideológico de circulação do sentido, e desenvolvemos a noção de clivagens subterrâneas, que Pêcheux sugere em Ler o Arquivo Hoje (1982). Apesar da intensa heterogeneidade possibilitada pela materialidade do online, o que de predominante que acabamos por encontrar na estrutura técnica das redes de relacionamento foi a forma-histórica do capitalismo contemporâneo, estruturando as relações sociais, e a própria constituição da subjetividade, através do que acabamos por categorizar como relações de consumo / Abstract: This research centered its investigation on social networks as technological devices for communication and the establishment of social relations. By means of the appropriation and application of several theoretical dispositifs from discursive theory and historical materialism, this paper sought to analyze technical aspects of these networks as ideologically structured, deconstructing the implied formulations for subjects, social relations, and the circulation of meaning imbedded in this structuring. This research also heavily relied on the philosophical methods of Jean Baudrillard in order to rethink certain notional operations of duality, especially in the case of online/off-line, and their relevance, both epistemic and social, for the present. This research appropriates itself of the notion of Archive as an ideological principal for the circulation of all meaning, and develops the idea of subterranean cleavages, which Pêcheux suggests in Lir L¿archive Aujourd¿hui (1982). In spite of intensely heterogeneous material possibilities intrinsic of the online environment, what we have predominantly found in the technical structure of social networks is the historic-form of contemporary capitalism, structuring social relations, and even the constitution of subjects, through what we have come to categorize as relationships of consumption / Mestrado / Divulgação Científica e Cultural / Mestre em Divulgação Científica e Cultural

This research study, funded by the Leverhulme Trust as part of the CURLIEW project, explored how learners understand, construct, express, and manage identity when virtual worlds are utilized in higher education and how the virtual world itself might impact on concepts of identity. In particular, the study focused on aspects of learner identity from the physical world and learner identity in virtual worlds, the latter being a ‘translation’ of physical identity markers onto the avatar. The research builds on the experiences of 75 student participants, who employed virtual worlds as learning environments. A narrative research approach was applied to thematically analyze interview, focus group, and observational data, collected from two educational contexts at two British universities. Three themes emerged from the analysis and interpretation of these data, which are presented as narratives of Pursuit, Embodiment, and Resistance. The study makes two main contributions to existing knowledge on learning in virtual environments: firstly, it reveals that virtual worlds are ‘threshold concepts’, in which students need to be able to align their learner identities with the utilization of virtual worlds to integrate them successfully in their learning. Secondly, the study develops a five-dimensional typology of the ways in which students engage and manage identity directly in the virtual world through their avatars. This typology includes: dislocated avatars, representative avatars, avatars as toys and tools, avatars as extensions of self, and avatars as identity extensions. The study demonstrates that engagement with virtual worlds and avatars in the educational context can provide a valuable opportunity to foster critical thinking, if learner identities are given a central place in course design and delivery. Then, virtual world learning can enable students and tutors to reflect critically on what shapes, influences, and constrains identity in virtual worlds, in the physical world, in higher education, and beyond.

The goal of this thesis is to synthesize believable motions of a character interacting with its surroundings and manipulating objects through physical contacts and forces. Human-like autonomous avatars are in increasing demand in areas such as entertainment, education, and health care. Yet modeling the basic human motor skills of locomotion and manipulation remains a long-standing challenge in animation research. The seemingly simple tasks of navigating an uneven terrain or grasping cups of different shapes involve planning with complex kinematic and physical constraints as well as adaptation to unexpected perturbations. Moreover, natural movements exhibit unique personal characteristics that are complex to model. Although motion capture technologies allow virtual actors to use recorded human motions in many applications, the recorded motions are not directly applicable to tasks involving interactions for two reasons. First, the acquired data cannot be easily adapted to new environments or different tasks goals. Second, acquisition of accurate data is still a challenge for fine scale object manipulations. In this work, we utilize data to create natural looking animations, and mitigate data deficiency with physics-based simulations and numerical optimizations. We develop algorithms based on a single reference motion for three types of control problems. The first problem focuses on motions without contact constraints. We use joint torque patterns identified from the captured motion to simulate responses and recovery of the same style under unexpected pushes. The second problem focuses on locomotion with foot contacts. We use contact forces to control an abstract dynamic model of the center of mass, which sufficiently describes the locomotion task in the input motion. Simulation of the abstract model under unexpected pushes or anticipated changes of the environment results in responses consistent with both the laws of physics and the style of the input. The third problem focuses on fine scale object manipulation tasks, in which accurate finger motions and contact information are not available. We propose a sampling method to discover contact relations between the hand and the object from only the gross motion of the wrists and the object. We then use the abundant contact constraints to synthesize detailed finger motions. The algorithm creates finger motions of various styles for a diverse set of object shapes and tasks, including ones that are not present at capture time. The three algorithms together control an autonomous character with dexterous hands to interact naturally with a virtual world. Our methods are general and robust across character structures and motion contents when testing on a wide variety of motion capture sequences and environments. The work in this thesis brings closer the motor skills of a virtual character to its human counterpart. It provides computational tools for the analysis of human biomechanics, and can potentially inspire the design of novel control algorithms for humanoid robots.

This thesis explores the idea of how people 'do gender' in their online use of avatars, specifically avatar choice. A secondary question of whether or not a chatterbot can be used as a potential interviewer will also be examined as a tool acquiring large amounts of interview data. Gender is one of the ways in which we structure our society, and is completely omnipresent. We cannot opt out of participating in our gender, as we are constantly performing and reaffirming it. Because of this, gender performance and choice spills over into all domains. This includes entertainment such as massively multiplayer online games, both in how the designers make the game, and what the players bring to the game. Deconstructing how and why people engage in these gendered practices and choices becomes an interesting avenue of research, because it allows researchers to partially separate the mental aspects of gender from physical attributes, as the players' physical bodies are not actually in the game. Through the lens of the popular massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, this thesis will utilize a qualitative user research study to understand how gender affects avatar choices. Prior research identified areas where players brought real world gender norms into the games they played. This research study will extend previous research by having players identify why they made the choices they made for their avatars, and how they feel about those choices. The methodology for this study will also involve using a chatterbot as a way of gathering interviews. In normal person-to-person interview studies, recruiting and organizing meetings for these interviews can often be a difficult task. This thesis brings in the idea of using a chatterbot as a mechanism to gather more interviews in a shorter time span to alleviate the problem of getting these one-on-one interviews in some types of studies.

In many economic applications, a collective outcome experienced by a group of people is determined by individual decisions made by its constituents. Hence, understanding how individuals make decisions in group settings is important, but empirical and observational analyses are often complicated by confounding factors. This dissertation contains three essays that use controlled experiments designed to isolate, and measure the impact of, mechanisms predicted to affect behavior. Chapter 1 studies behavior under digital anonymity. A distinctive feature of the digital world is the ability to calibrate or withhold one's identifier: a person can be identified by a string of letters, an avatar, their real name, or even nothing at all. That digital identifiers allow a person to mask their physical identity also makes it difficult to attribute digital actions to a physical person, even when the actions are observed. I embed these features in an experiment where subjects play a finitely repeated, linear public goods game. Treated subjects are identified in one of three ways—by their photograph, by a random number, or by a self-designed cartoon avatar—and their individual choices are revealed and either attributed to, or decoupled from, their identifier. In line with the previous literature, identifying subjects and increasing the precision of attribution increases contributions relative to a baseline condition without identifiers or revealed individual choices. Remarkably, however, the largest impact on behavior comes from having an identifier in the first place: for a given level of attribution, the experimental data suggest that being identified by a number or by an avatar is as powerful as being identified by one's photograph. Chapter 2 studies whether and how individuals imbue digital avatars with self image and social image considerations. While digital avatars have become more commonplace and sophisticated, they need not resemble the physical appearance of the person using it. This inconsistency raises the question of how an avatar induces image considerations, relative to a person's physical appearance. I embed avatars into a dictator game and conduct two experiments, one addressing self image and the other social image. The direction of the treatment effect in the dictator game for both experiments suggests that individuals do attach image considerations to their avatars, though the effects are not statistically significant. Additionally, I find that subjects create significantly more positively perceived avatars when they know that their avatar will be shown to another subject who will decide how to allocate an endowment with them. Chapter 3, joint with Alessandra Casella and Michelle Jiang, studies the impact of an alternative voting system on the minority's turnout and resultant victories. We start from the observation that under majoritarian election systems, securing participation and representation of minorities remains an open problem, made salient in the US by its history of voter suppression. One remedy recommended by the courts is Cumulative Voting (CV): each voter has as many votes as open positions and can cumulate votes on as few candidates as desired. Theory predicts that CV encourages the minority to overcome obstacles to voting: although each voter is treated equally, CV increases minority's turnout relative to the majority, and the minority's share of seats won. A lab experiment based on a costly voting design strongly supports both predictions. Chapter 3 was published in Volume 141 of Games and Economic Behavior, pp. 133-155, September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2023.05.012.

Mission is a central aspect of the Christian faith and much thought is given to the challenge of proclaiming the gospel in a new context or to a different people group (i.e. contextualization). In recent years, a new context has come to the forefront that has been and is being created through technology, namely virtual reality (VR). The purpose of this study is to explore how contextualization, with regards to evangelization, needs to be done in VR. The proposed thesis is that VR provides a new context in which the Christian faith is, or should be, shared in a contextualized way. Although much thought is given to the question of religion in VR, it mostly focuses on the nature of communities online. This study addresses the issue of online evangelization, which has so far received less attention. This doctoral thesis is structured after the empirical-theological praxis cycle of Faix (2007a), and the Policy Delphi Method (PDM) is the research technique used. Through the PDM, a panel of experts from different backgrounds (theologians, sociologists, and practitioners) discussed the various ways in which VR affects evangelization, the way people form their religious identity, and how contextualization could take place. The aim of this research is to contribute to the field of missiology by investigating VR as a new context in which to proclaim the Christian faith. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / D. Th.(Missiology)

Thesis (MScIng)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: We designed a generic avatar animator for use in sign language related projects. The animator is capable of animating any given avatar that is compliant with the H-Anim standard for humanoid animation. The system was designed with the South African Sign Language Machine Translation (SASL-MT) project in mind, but can easily be adapted to other sign language projects due to its generic design. An avatar that is capable of accurately performing sign language gestures is a special kind of avatar and is referred to as a signing avatar. In this thesis we investigate the special characteristics of signing avatars and address the issue of finding a generic design for the animation of such an avatar. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Ons het ’n generiese karakteranimasiestelsel ontwikkel vir gebruik in gebaretaal verwante projekte. Die animasiestelsel het die vermo¨e om enige karaktermodel wat met die H-Anim standaard versoenbaar is, te animeer. Die animasiestelsel is ontwerp met die oog op gebruik in die South African Sign Language Machine Translation (SASL-MT) projek, maar kan maklik aangepas word vir ander gebaretaalprojekte te danke aan die generiese ontwerp. ’n Karaktermodel wat in staat is om gebare akkuraat te maak is ’n spesiale tipe karaktermodel wat bekend staan as ’n gebaretaal avatar (Engels : signing avatar). In hierdie tesis ondersoek ons die spesiale eienskappe van ’n gebaretaal avatar en beskou die soektog na ’n generiese ontwerp vir die animering van so ’n karaktermodel.