Questionnaire about presence in Second Life

Hello there,
I'm currently conducting an interdisciplinairy research about telepresence (the feeling of being present in a virtual environment) in Second Life at the University of Amsterdam together with 3 other researchers. Witmer and Singer (199 have used a questionnaire to measure presence in a virtual environment and we as research team are interested in answers from Second Life players.
We'd like you to answer these questions with a grade from 1-7, ranging from 1 - not ..., 4 moderately... and 7- totally....

1. How much are you able to control events?
2. How responsive is Second Life (SL) to actions that you initiated (or performed)
3. How natural do your interactions with the environment seem?
4. How completely are all of your senses engaged?
5. How much do the visual aspects of SL involve you?
6. How much do the auditory aspects of SL involve you?
7. How natural is the mechanism which controls movement through SL?
8. How awaree are you of events occurring in the real world around you?
9. How aware are you of your display and control devices?
10. How much do your experiences in SL seem consistent with your real-world experiences?
11. Are you able to anticipate what would happen next in SL?
12. How completely are you able to actively survey or search SL using vision?
13. How well can you indentify sounds?
14. How well can you localize sounds?
15. How closely are you able to examine objects?
16. How well can you examine objects from multiple viewpoints?
17. How well can you move or manipulate objects in SL?
18. How involved are you in SL?
19. How distracting is the control mechanism?
20. How much delay do you experience between your actions and expected outcomes?
21. How quickly did you adjust to SL?
22. How proficient in moving and interacting with SL do you feel at this point?
23. How much do the control devices interfere with the performance of activities?
24. How well can you concentrate on activities in game rather than on the mechanisms used to perform those tasks or activities?
25. Are you involved in SL to the extent that you lose track of time?

Last question is somewhat different:
26. Are there any changes you’d like to see in Second Life?

Please either reply to this post with the answers or send a mail to [email]ian.dashorst@student.uva.nl[/email] with subject SL questionnaire.
Any questions or suggestions can be directed there aswell.

Thanks for your cooperation,
Sarum Mosely (Ian Dashorst) and the other researchers.

ps. I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post this, any suggestions about posting this somewhere else are welcome. We'd like to get as many data as possible

I answered all of your questions, and to be extra helpful, I added up my answers and the total comes to 83.

Pep (Can I have my $1,000 now please?)

I know people always say this about SL surveys, but in the case of Second Life there's no substitute for experiencing it for yourself. And it's a lot more fun than gathering statistics too. Otherwise it's a bit like trying to describe a spiral staircase to a blind Martian!

Also most with most of the questions, people who'd been in SL for longer would give higher scores as they're more familiar with controls etc.

See today's post on Anthropological Research on Netiquette in SL for a general idea of how people in these forums feel about responding to research surveys.

All these questions depend on how long you have been in Second Life, because the whole thing is just asking one question, "How familiar are you with the controls?".

Your survey is horribly flawed.

Get real.

This.

At least other surveys posted here show at least some thought.... before we shoot them down anyway!

I'll do your survey if you do mine first.

1. Do you like mindless surveys?

2. In 1000 words or more, why do you like SL and what makes it unique.



Send this to me on a NC inworld and I will do the same for you.

I rarely get presence though Christmas is coming soon and i'm hoping Santa brings some presence then.

That is unfair. Most of the other surveys are about the social aspects

This one is a bit different in that it seems to exclusively about the interface and how immersed we are able to become in the world using it.

So the data is more of interest to game designers than social scientists

My reply to the survey is the interface is good, I do become involved in the world and am able to manipulate objects well.
The ability to manipulate objects in SL is far better than any other virtual world I have tried.

The most distracting thing for me is the effect lag has on your movement
It makes movement sometimes feel like walking through treacle or worse what we call "rubberbanding" or "drifting off into the sunset"
I believe these effects are because the server tells the client where your avatar should be (based on the client sending movement information). Games/platforms that dont have this problem work by the client sending your position

There is a huge difference between the researcher saying 'I hate the camera controls in SL' and '83% of SL users hate the camera controls in SL', and the first is no substitute for the second, and has no scientific value whatsoever. The researcher is not being asked his/her professor to identify what he/she likes or dislikes about SL, but what a significant sample think about SL.

Rock
PS: All questions answered

From what I read, I am assuming that the survey is worded in order to match a previous survey on virtual presence, so while it may sound a bit odd about SL, they are trying to get results that they can compare to earlier research, which should be valuable seeing how much virtual worlds have changed in the last 11 years. And the survey looks like it is trying to go beyond "do you like the camera controls in SL" to get at "do you see the controls in SL as a barrier to interacting in SL?" There is a growing body of research on how people identify with their avatars, and how seamless the experience is in virtual worlds (that is, are you seeing yourself as distinct from your avatar?).

But, as others have posted, this is not a good forum for conducting research. I would suggest that you look up the Second Life Educators' [SLED] listserve. You'll get a better response there.

Honestly, Pep. I think the average would have been more helpful.

I'm an accountant! As a consequence, I am much better at taking away than adding up, to be honest . . .

Pep (And sharing is *not* something that accountants are at all good at! )

Mean, median, or mode? Please specify which average you are referring to.

I guess I really meant the standard deviation.

But you know - this is directed at the questioner - you really ought to have your professor come here so we can straighten him or her out. They shouldn't be sending you off on wild goose chases like this.

This forum has so many deviations, I'm not sure that we could agree on a standard.

Don't write lines like that while I am drinking my coffee. It went everywhere!

Rock

A census taker once tried to test me...

lol

PS, where is one of those pic with caption making sites? I want that (prior post) on a jpg...it's gonna get a lot of use around here.

Totally irrelevant... how many of these surveys the forums get bombarded with do you think will ever be published anywhere? They are mostly undergrad projects where the students have jumped on the SL bandwagon without having any experience whatsoever themselves... they have to do a project and try to find a way to do one involving as little work as possible to get the marks. I would bet that half of them give up and find another topic before they've even come back to the forums to look at any of the replies, the other half will hand it in for someone to spend 10 minutes grading it and that's it, it will be filed and forgotten.

Noone will EVER see the data, however interesting (or not) and the half hour you spent carefully answering the questions is half an hour ofn your life you will never get back (although obviously it's your time to waste in that way if you want).

Admittedly, VERY rarely there is a well thought out and professional looking attempt, which is obviously being carried out by a professional... but these are very few and far between and I'm far from convinced that this one sits in that category.

EDIT: Does ANYONE recall ANY survey poster coming back and telling us the results?

Apparantly I'm not getting responses I've hoped for and I think this is partly a fault of me.
I'll explain briefly what the goal is of the research I'm doing, and what this survey is about as this seems to be not clear.

The goal of our research is to investigate the telepresence in Second Life and if there is any way to improve this. To know how to improve something you want to know how something is experienced. And since neither of us is familiar with SL itself we have to ask other people that actually play the game. And we're not investigating the social aspect of the game indeed, but more a technical point of view on how to improve.
Telepresence has been proven to be important for players' intention to participate in Virtual Communities (Jung, 200, which I reckon to be a vital part in Second Life.

We've picked these questions that were orignally used by Witmer, Singer (199 (search for Witmer, B.G. & Singer, M.J. (199. Measuring presence in virtual environments: a presence questionnaire. Presence, 7,3, 225- 240), where they made a virtual environment where they tested people's sense of presence with this questionnaire and out of these data they could link important factors with eachother.

And as this may seem as another mindless survey about the game, this could actually supply us with vital data. And you would make 4 students extremely happy .

If possible I'd like the people that want to answer these questions seriously to answer accordingly:
1. 4
2. 3
3. 6 (numbers chosen randomly).
and so further. A total of the score doesn't give that much information.

Sarum

Either of these would be good:




.