Norms in web based communities

Most of well-known virtual communities -such as Second Life, Active Worlds, Entropia and

others- require participants to agree to the company's terms of service in the signing up

process (Linden, 2008). Participants should understand the terms and conditions to which

they are agreeing as a member of that community. Most people don't read or are otherwise

immune due to the lack of real consequences. There are some types of incorrect behaviours

that we think can be addressed programatically, that is contemplated in the design of the

VW platform and ensured at deployment time.

We propose to use intelligent objects (iObjects) as elements helping users to comply norms

and if it is necessary to prevent forbidden actions. For example, to block entry to people who

is less than 18 years old in a special virtual room. WonderDAC is an extension module

developed for Wonderland that allows to show or hide parts of a VW depending on the user

and group profile (Wright and Madey, 2008). In contrast to WonderDAC, developed to

control discretionary access basing on users and group permissions, our approach is more

general allowing, for example, the control of access to spaces based on the historic of user

activities. For example, a norm establishes that a participant can not enter to the projection

room unless he has bought a ticket for that room and session.

Part of our inspiration for a general interaction approach for objects populating a social

virtual world comes from the smart objects proposal (Kallmann et al., 2000) (Abaci et al,

2005) and the posterior work done by Jorinssen (Jorissen et al., 2004) (Jorissen et al., 2005).

Nevertheless, our approach is different to those because they worked with their own virtual

environments named ACE (Agent Common Environment) and ALVIC (Architecture for

Large-Scale Virtual Interactive communities), respectively. In this way, their object

interaction approach is general in the sense it is independent of the final application but can

14 Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agents

not get out of their concrete virtual platform (they have their own scripting language and

engine). Our interaction framework for control and assist activities in SVW has been

designed to be applied to different VW platforms such as Wonderland and Second Life. In

this way, rendering and event capture continue being controlled in the concrete VW

platform but the behaviour decision is managed in an external and generic manager

connected with an AI based module, i.e. Electronic Institution.

Virtual worlds can be seen as singular information spaces where the virtual nature of the 3D

space (e.g.. floor) and the furniture (e.g.. noticeboard) can be exploited in a special manner

not possible for their real counterparts. For example, in the real world it is not possible to

dynamically change tiles colour in a floor to represent an agree/disagree position of

participants in a discussion. This has been done in a recent work (Harry & Donath, 2008).

We aim to incorporate an added value to virtual objects allowing to give valuable

information to participants. As an example in section 4.1, a door is visualized either green or

red depending on the user trying to pass through. Accessibility issues can also be addressed

in these information spaces, for example a noticeboard object adapts letter size depending

either on user profile and on the distance between the user and the panel. Exploiting these

native properties of virtual objects, we create rich and expressive social spaces.

We extend the dynamic conception of current VW platforms in which users are free to

dynamically change aspects of the virtual world by means of built-in tools and scripting

behaviours (Friedman et al., 2007) (Sun, 2008). Part of the unexplored feature of virtual

spaces is their ability to be adapted in architectural terms. Our proposal is to extend the

ability of a VW to dynamically change itself and exploit the virtualness of the space

supporting the presentation of information, which would be impossible to do in the real

world, and so provide a better support to participants on their activities.