The rapid growth of the internet over the past decade has provided increasing opportunities for individuals to engage in computer-mediated social interaction in virtual environments. Despite this rapid growth there has been limited research into the way people use the Internet, and the effect Internet use has on their lives (Kraut, 1996). The overall aim in the research presented in this thesis was to explore how characteristics of the individual interact with characteristics of computer-mediated communication to enable socio-emotional communication and behaviour in social text-based virtual environments. Three studies are presented. Studies One and Two are qualitative studies of social interaction in two text-based, synchronous ('real time') virtual environments: MOOs (Multi User Dimensions, Object Oriented) and Internet Relay' Chat (IRC). Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) methodology was used to develop formal theories of social interaction within these environments. Stage models of virtual environment use were developed that described changes in social interaction over time. In MOOs, changes in social interaction over time reflected the process of coming to terms with what was initially viewed by users as an alternative reality. In IRC the central feature of social interaction that emerged was the perceived ease of communication. This was attributed to the effortlessness of meeting a wide range of potential communication partners in a social context where the communication itself was simplified to text only communication. The hypotheses developed from the qualitative research in Studies One and Two were tested in Study Three. This was a longitudinal study of new Internet users that examined the bi-directional effects of personality characteristics and computer-mediated communication on behaviour. Personality measures were poor predictors of time spent in ++ / both specific types of virtual environments and on-line in general. Based on the usage patterns across the three studies a decision pathway for the use of virtual environments was developed. A key finding across the studies was the potential for virtual environments to enhance psychological well-being for individuals who experience social discomfort in off-line settings. Limitations of the research were discussed and suggestions made for future research.

The study in this report mainly focuses on the Internet-based Monitoring and Controlling of a Real-Time Dynamic System interfaced via a dedicated local computer. The main philosophy behind this study is to allow the remote user to conduct an Internet-based Remote Operation (I-bRO) for the dynamic system. The dynamic system has been defined as the system which has its parts interrelated in such a way that a change in one part necessarily affects other parts of the system [I]. In order to achieve this goal, the study has been conducted in a form of an on-line and real-time Virtual Laboratory (VL). Through this form of laboratory, a user can carry out the experiment, perform real-time monitoring and controlling operations of the experiment and collect real and live data from the experiment through the network link as the user was physically in the laboratory. The dynamic system that has been selected for the test-rig of this study is a 3-phase Induction Motor (IM) which is mechanically coupled with a DC-Dynamometer that acts as a variable load to the IM. This system is a common laboratory experiment in the study of the Electrical Engineering for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The study covers both sides of the I-bRO; the hardware and the software. The hardware side includes the design and the development of a load control box that has been used to interface the DC-Dynamometer and consequently control it from the local computer. The software side covers the design and the development of the Virtual Instrumentation System (VIS) that has replaced successfully the physical Measurement and Test (M&T) instruments of the test-rig. Beside that, the software side includes the development of the internet remote front panel for the remote operation. / Furthermore, the software side includes the development of the software that has been used to analyse the system during the I-bRO. In this study, the LabVTEW7 program has been used to design and develop the VIS and the Matlab program has bee used to aualyse the system performance for the remote operations. This study also addresses the issues and problems related to the intranet or the internet to be used as the network for data communication between the test-rig and remote users. This study has been carried out in different stages as follows: 1. Designing and development of the VIS. 2. Interfacing the test-rig apparatus with a local computer. 3. Upload the system from the local computer to the network. 4. Study the performance of the system on the network for the purpose of the remote operations controlled over the internet. The developed system of this study has been used for data acquisition, network communications, instruments monitoring and controlling applications. A user can execute on-line and in the real-time the developed VIS from any point in the university. Due to the fact that the university network is directly integrated to the main internet server. a remote user through the main internet server is able to perform I-bRO of the selected dynamic system. There are many factors associated with the network, the internet or the intranet, and have direct influences on the control system performance throughout the remote operations. The most dominant factors are the random time-delays and the data losses. / These factors among others have to be addressed for a proper application of the I-bRO. For this reason, different cases and scenarios of the I-bRO have been investigated and simulated to study the affection of the network on the control system performance. The system is analysed under two control cases, closed loop with random time-delays and open loop when the internet server is disconnected and no communication between the input and the output of the system. In the first case, the closed loop, the internet server is assumed to be closed and subjected to random time-delays. In the second case, the internet server is subjected to random cut-off and thus opens the control loop. The results of both cases have been analysed and discussed. It has been found that, if the control system without the time-delays is stable, it remains stable even with small time-delays up to twenty seconds. This result is different from what has been shown in the literature.

In the so-called postmodern era, when networked media are increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life, where the ‘real’ and the ‘simulation’ become ever more indistinguishable; the physical and virtual intertwine; machines and man merge, and audience and stars transpose. To understand consumption in a time when realness and authenticity are no longer relevant, this thesis draws attention to the consumption and production of media content through case studies of consumer participation and social trends in Japan. The work begins in a themed shopping mall, Venus Fort in Tokyo Bay; continues with the reproduction of Audrey Hepburn‘s image; expands to the dramatised ‘realness’ of television; and finally moves to the omnipresent mobile phone and the impact of networked personal media on our idea of the ‘real’. First, through an analysis of a themed consumption environment, it is suggested that a transition is taking place in consumption from objects to experiences, services and spectacle. Secondly, by showing Audrey Hepburn‘s transition from a Hollywood star to a virtualised idol, technologically-aided illusions are shown to make hierarchical realness irrelevant. Thirdly, via Reality TV dating programs, the focus shifts to the role of audience participation in the consumption of media content. These themes are demonstrated individually, then merged into the last example – the social and cultural evolution induced by the mass consumption of networked media, that promise to revolutionise the way we consume, communicate and connect between people, machines and consumer goods.The thesis grounds its analysis of contemporary trends in the culture of consumption in Japan in theories of commodity and culture, the real and the simulation, speed and reality, the spectacle and the self in mediated spaces, and probes further into the collapse of demarcations between the virtual and the real, the event and the everyday and media and the self in the network society / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology. / This thesis establishes Virtual Institutions as a comprehensive software engineering technology for the development of 3D Virtual Worlds that require normative regulation of participants’ interactions (such as the commercially-oriented Virtual Worlds). 3D Virtual Worlds technology currently offers somewhat unregulated environments without means to enforce norms of behavior and interaction rules on their inhabitants. Furthermore, existing methodologies for Virtual Worlds development focus primarily on the design side of the “look-and-feel” of the inhabited space. Consequently, in current 3D Virtual Worlds it is difficult to keep track of the deviant behavior of participants and to guarantee a high level of security and predictable overall behavior of the system. The Virtual Institutions Methodology proposed by this dissertation is focused on designing highly secure heterogeneous Virtual Worlds (with humans and autonomous agents participating in them), where the participants behave autonomously and make their decisions freely within the limits imposed by the set of norms of the institution. It is supported by a multilayer model and representational formalisms, and the corresponding tools that facilitate rapid development of norm-governed Virtual Worlds and offer full control over stability and security issues. An important part of the Virtual Institutions Methodology is concerned with the relationship between humans and autonomous agents. In particular, the ways to achieve human-like behavior by learning such behavior from the humans themselves are investigated. It is explained how formal description of the interaction rules together with full observation of the users’ actions help to improve the human-like believability of autonomous agents in Virtual Institutions. The thesis proposes the concept of implicit training, which enables the process of teaching autonomous agents human characteristics without any explicit training efforts required from the humans, and develops the computational support for this new learning method. The benefits of using Virtual Institutions are illustrated through applying this technology to the domain of E-Commerce. It is demonstrated that providing shoppers with a normative environment that offers immersive experience and supports important real world attributes like social interaction, location awareness, advanced visualization, collaborative shopping and impulsive purchases can improve existing practices in E-Commerce portals.

The Evolvable Virtual Machine abstract architecture (EVMA) is a computational architecture for dynamic hierarchically organised virtual machines. The concrete EVM instantiation (EVMI) builds on traditional stack-based models of computation and extends them by notions of hierarchy and reflection on the virtual machine level. The EVM Universe is composed of a number of autonomous and asynchronously communicating EVM machines. The main contribution of this work lies in the new model of computation and in the architecture itself: a novel, compact, flexible and expressive representation of distributed concurrent computation. The EVMA provides a way of expressing and modelling auto-catalytic networks composed of a hierarchical hypercycle of autopoietic subsystems characterised by self-adaptable structural tendencies and self-organised criticality. EVMA provides capabilities for: a) self-learning of dynamical patterns through continuous observation of computable environments, b) self-compacting and generalisation of existing program structures, c) emergence of efficient and robust communication code through appropriate machine assembly on both ends of communication channel. EVMA is in one sense a multi-dimensional generalisation of stack machine with the purpose of modelling concurrent asynchronous processing. EVMA approach can be also seen as a meta-evolutionary theory of evolution. The EVMA is designed to model systems that mimic living autonomous and adaptable computational processes. The EVMI prototype has been designed and developed to conduct experimental studies on complex evolving systems. The generality of our approach not only provides the means to experiment with complex hierarchical, computational and evolutionary systems, but it provides a useful model to evaluate, share and discuss the complex hierarchical systems in general. The EVMA provides a novel methodology and language to pursue research, to understand and to talk about evolution of complexity in living systems. In this thesis, we present the simple single-cell EVMI framework, discuss the multi-cell EVM Universe architecture, present experimental results, and propose further extensions, experimental studies, and possible hardware implementations of the EVMI.

Thesis (M.Sc.)(Computer Science)--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes summary. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-123).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wyoming, 2006. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Dec. 20, 2007). Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-83).

<p>Mitrionics is a company based in Lund, Sweden. They develop a platform for FPGA-based acceleration, the platform includes a virtual processor, the Mitrion Virtual Processor, that can be custom built to fit the application that is to be accelerated. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the possible benefits of using a centralized scheduler for the Mitrion Virtual Processor instead of the current solution which is a distributed scheduler. A centralized scheduler has been implemented and evaluated using a set of benchmark applications. It has been found that the centralized scheduler can decrease the number of registers used to implement the Mitrion Virtual Processor on an FPGA. The size of the decrease depends on the application, and certain applications are more suitable than others. It has also been found that the introduction of a centralized scheduler makes it more difficult for the place and route tool to fit a design on the FPGA resulting in failed timing constraints for the largest benchmark application.</p> / <p>Mitrionics är ett företag i Lund. De utvecklar en platform för FPGA-baserad acceleration av applikationer. Platformen innehåller bland annat en virtuell processor, Mitrion Virtual Processor, vilken kan specialanpassas till applikationen som ska accelereras. Syftet med detta arbete är att implementera en centraliserad schedulerare för Mitrion Virtual Processor och utvärdera vilka möjliga fördelar det kan finnas jämfört med att använda den nuvarande lösningen vilket är en distribuerad skedulerare. En centraliserad skedulerare har implementerats och utvärderas genom att avända en uppsättning testapplikationer. Det har funnits att användandet av en centraliserad skedulerare kan minska antalet register som behövs för att implementera Mitrion Virtual Processor på en FPGA. Vidare har det funnits att storleken på minskningen beror på applikationen och att vissa applikationer lämpar sig bättre än andra. Det har även visat sig att processen att placera logik på FPGAn blir svårare om man använder en centraliserad skedulerare, detta har resulterat i att vissa timing krav inte har mötts när den största testapplikation har syntetiserats.</p>

This study examined fairness in the online society of World of Warcraft(WoW), a society under constraint by game developers but dynamically affected by users. Because the society is voluntary, people have the ability to both effect major change on, and leave, that society at any time. Thus, fairness in this virtual world is an important area for anthropological research. In-game fairness pointed to the organization, distribution, and acquisition of wealth. In particular, I examined player perceptions of real-money trading (RMT) in the context of individual and collective motivations in the endgame. In addition, I considered loot distribution systems as a mode of promoting player-initiated definitions of fairness. I discovered an overall economy of fun in which players act to maximize fun for the majority. Real-money trading was justified by casual players because players require progression as individuals in order to better serve the fun of the collective.

The purpose of this project is to develop a software framework, a 3D engine, which will generate images to be projected onto facets of a spatially immersive display (SID). The goal is to develop a software library to support the creation of images of specified 3D environments which are specific to the display geometries of a polyhedral class of SIDs. Part of this goal is developing auxiliary software to allow this library to be thoroughly tested. When properly working, the images being displayed on adjoining faces of the SID appear spatially and temporally consistent with one another, creating the illusion that the user is within a surrounding three-dimensional space.