PhD researcher wanting to interview residents about in-world shopping habits

[Caeruleiae]

11 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

@GuliaMCR- some of the feedback is colored by our cumulative experience as a group, having been sent multiple surveys over time. In no way do I think you should take any comments personally.

I disagree with those who say you should  login to Second Life and try it yourself, assuming you are attempting to perform unbiased research.

I can see why some might think having experience in the area might offer some bias that colors the outcome, depending on the topic. One of the assignments for a course during my MBA someone tried to do their part of a group project on OpenSim (marketing, mostly, but not entirely) and was shut down by the professor when it was very clear the person's experience and knowledge of the platform was so inadequate. That was the first time I had found anyone in any of my courses that had experiece with a virtual world, and it happened to be the professor in this case. That course is also why I started looking more closely at virtual spaces. 

The student was asked what type of experience and knowledge they had with and about the platform, what they knew about the topics they were trying to cover and how it relates to that platform. It was obvious the student just asked other people, maybe read a few websites and didn't even understand how OpenSim works or what it is. They tried to take an easy route on what was a complicated group project. Experience might lend some bias, since everything does, but it also lends direct knowledge, rather than indirect. That's something this professor drilled into us during that course, because statistics only give so much information. For anything involving marketing or consumer spending habits in a place like a virtual world, you're going to need at least some direct knowledge to make sense of it.  If MBA level students and professors understand that, PhD level ones definitely should. 

I am glad to see that OP is at trying to improve the processes chosen though, at least it's not someone who is only trying to only take the easiest route to an end project as possible. I can't say the same for the other student who eventually was removed from the course. for a bunch of reasons.

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

Market research

[HelenaNavy92]

Congratulations @GuliaMCRfor your enthusiasm. But I have to warn you that Second life is addictive.😜

I answered your questions but I have to note that you can buy not only using real money, you can work in sl and earn money. I'm not sure there is another platform that have that kind of economy. 

About the Zuck's metaverse - I think that idea of buying rl staff is not the only thing. Famous brands offering virtual goods is also a thing. 

I'm sorry that my english is not good enough. I hope you got my point. 

[diamond Marchant]

On 12/2/2022 at 2:09 AM, GuliaMCR said:

research about virtual consumption on Metaverse

What you are doing is research on Second Life, which is not the Metaverse. Second life is a 20 year old walled-garden sandbox game that uses game tokens and has an internal economy.

If SL were the Metaverse, Zuckerberg could have just bought us (for a lot less than 10 billion US).

[GuliaMCR]

@Sasy Scarborough@HelenaNavy92, thank you for your encouragement, i really appreciate it. Also, thanks for your time and suggestion of new ideas.

@diamond Marchant thank you for your comment. I am sad that my use of word "'metaverse" created so much confusion. In fact, as mentioned earlier, I did not mean Zucherberg Meta Horizons. Rather I meant the virtual worlds with social characteristics. As I mentioned before, I will be careful with wording in the future, because unforunately with word "metaverse" lots of people reffer to Zuckerberg Meta, while in fact there are many other metaverses and social virtual worlds tha exist.

[Resi Pfeffer]

2 hours ago, GuliaMCR said:

I am sad that my use of word "'metaverse" created so much confusion.

Dont be. You handle the forums reaction very well.
That sets you apart from the other "scientific researchers", dashing off their surveys into the forum and then never checking back on the topic at all.

[Drayke Newall]

21 hours ago, GuliaMCR said:

In fact, as mentioned earlier, I did not mean Zucherberg Meta Horizons.

It is good that you are understanding what the metaverse is however you still haven't understood it completely. Horizons is not the or a metaverse nor is it the metaverse that Zuckerberg and Meta are (wanting to) creating. Horizon Worlds is a virtual world/game just like second life is albeit rather basic and was created prior to Meta or even their investigations into the metaverse as a world that could be accessed by their Oculus Rift VR headset. 

21 hours ago, GuliaMCR said:

while in fact there are many other metaverses and social virtual worlds tha exist.

There are no 'metaverses' that exist at the moment only virtual worlds. The metaverse is a combination of all virtual worlds linked together as one and accessed as by a single program.

Edited December 9, 2022 by Drayke Newall

[Gabriele Graves]

Zuckerberg says "Metaverse" yet all I hear is "Panopticon".

[Resi Pfeffer]

53 minutes ago, Drayke Newall said:

There are no 'metaverses' that exist at the moment only virtual worlds. The metaverse is a combination of all virtual worlds linked together as one and accessed as by a single program.

That just gave me a nightmare - me not paying attention,  flying over a sim/verse crossing and loosing my legs suddenly. Panicking, taking off to the next sim, just to get my body, head and limbs turned into blocks, and finally, while trying to find back home, getting smashed into a lifeless 2D NFT texture.

[Arielle Popstar]

2 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

There are no 'metaverses' that exist at the moment only virtual worlds. The metaverse is a combination of all virtual worlds linked together as one and accessed as by a single program.

I'd have to disagree and point out that Opensimulator is at this point the only one that qualifies as being a metaverse by your definition. It has now surpassed over 100,000 S/L sized sims hosted by thousands of individual servers in a peer to peer network and stitched together through the Hypergrid, allowing for travel between many of those. It doesn't have the concurrency of S/L but at the least it has more then many of these other virtual worlds vying for the title of being the Metaverse and has shown consistent growth in the 15 years of its existence.

 

There are also some ongoing efforts aimed at being able to jump from it to worlds on other platforms like Unity and High Fidelity when it was being actively worked on. The metaverse I believe will be more likely to come as a result of a grassroots sort of effort through an opensourced platform then any proprietary one held by an individual company.

@GuliaMCRmay want to consider contrasting the inworld shopping habits between the proprietary closed garden S/L and the opensourced Opensim to get a better idea of the differences.

[Drayke Newall]

24 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I'd have to disagree and point out that Opensimulator is at this point the only one that qualifies as being a metaverse by your definition. It has now surpassed over 100,000 S/L sized sims hosted by thousands of individual servers in a peer to peer network and stitched together through the Hypergrid, allowing for travel between many of those. It doesn't have the concurrency of S/L but at the least it has more then many of these other virtual worlds vying for the title of being the Metaverse and has shown consistent growth in the 15 years of its existence.

As I said in an earlier post, yes, OpenSim is the closest we have to a metaverse (in the old use of the term) however it is still not one and is why OpenSim themselves have not stated they are a metaverse but a hypergrid and the basis of a nascent distributed Metaverse i.e. has the potential to be a future metaverse.

There is a difference between a virtual world and a region sized area that OpenSim and SL have. OpenSim also has limitations in that it cannot do AR, VR or link very well to RL (think virtual amazon with virtual displays and a payment processing system that allows you to buy in world and have it delivered to your door in RL). These three things are also needed for it to be termed as the metaverse per todays definition.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

At this point pretty much everyone has their own personal definition of what they consider the metaverse to be but, given that in order to create anything of that magnitude there needs to be a clear profit incentive before anyone will consider investing the necessary capital, it seems unlikely that the metaverse will spring up purely as a social/entertainment platform.

Personally I suspect that the metaverse will begin with applications such as this...

...shortly followed by virtual meetings and boardrooms and eventually, rather than just moving between one digital twin workplace to another, having social hangouts and forms of entertainment such as games and live events hosted on the same network of platforms that house the digital twins at which people work.

[Drayke Newall]

7 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

At this point pretty much everyone has their own personal definition of what they consider the metaverse to be but, given that in order to create anything of that magnitude there needs to be a clear profit incentive before anyone will consider investing the necessary capital, it seems unlikely that the metaverse will spring up purely as a social/entertainment platform.

Agree. Chat Rooms and meetings virtually are handled already much better in programs like zoom etc and it is the linking of those virtual environments that already exist to other virtual environments that is defined as the metaverse. As I mentioned in my previous post, the metaverse is the equivalent of internet 2.0. Virtual environments, worlds, apps etc all linked together as one where both RL, VR and AR are incorporated.

Taking your video example and linking it further to show the RL link the metaverse will be taking as far as Augmented Reality goes, the below video shows the construction aspect of your NVidia Omniverse data center whereby, plans to construction to maintenance is performed using AR goggles such as Microsoft HoloLens.

 

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

On 12/5/2022 at 6:25 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

Your approach almost guarantees you will entirely miss the point and fail to grasp why people use these platforms

I don't think that's the point of this study - the 'why'.

What I think the point of this study is to evaluate to what extent people are willing to spend real money on consuming virtual goods, possibly with the goal of making people consume even more virtual goods. The study's been done by a business school after all. The reason as to 'why' likely simply boils down to 'ooh, shiny!'

[StarlanderGoods]

On 12/2/2022 at 10:28 AM, GuliaMCR said:

Actually, in my research I try to study which metaverse platform chracteristics and which product characteristics make you purchase virtual items. Also, virtual items are important not only for fun, but also for expressing yourself in the platform community. Will highly appreciate if you could fill out the questionnaire.

Thanks!

Gulia

You should watch Dan Olson´s video "Manufactured Discontent" to see what how a plataform can push the user to buy certain items, particularly the ones that are to express oneself.