VWSocialLab: Prototype Virtual World (VW) Toolkit for Social and Behavioral Science Experimental Set-Up and Control

Abstract

There are benefits for social and behavioral researchers to conduct studies in online virtual worlds. However, typically learning scripting takes additional time or money to hire a consultant. We propose a prototype Virtual World Toolkit for to help researchers design, set up, and run experiments in Virtual Worlds, with little coding or scripting experience needed. We explored three types of prototype designs, focused on a traditional interface with pilot results. We also present results of initial expert user study of our toolkit to determine the learnability, usability, and feasibility of our toolkit to conduct experiments. Results suggest that our toolkit requires little training and sufficient capabilities for a basic experiment. The toolkit received a great feedback from a number of expert users who thought that it is a promising first version that lays the foundation to more future improvements. This toolkit prototype contributes to enhancing researchers’ capabilities in conducting social/behavioral studies in virtual worlds and hopefully will empower social and behavioral researchers by proving a toolkit prototype that requires less time, efforts and costs to setup stimulus responses types of human subject studies in virtual worlds.