I've been writing a paper which attempts to collect some of my current
ideas about users and agents in collaborative virtual environments.
One of the situations I've been considering is the possibility that a
single physical user have multiple virtual embodiments (probably but not
necessarily in different virtual worlds). At any one time the user will
"inhabit" at most one of these embodiments with the others being controlled
by autonmous agents or simply being inactive. Some reasons why this might
be useful are:
- a user might want to attend to some event in the real world without
disconnecting from the CVE and so wants to leave an embodiment that
signals them whevener an "interesting" event occurs in the CVE
- a user might want to rapidly switch between different worlds and so
leaves inactive embodiments arround as "bookmarks"
- in a similar fashion to the first example a user might want to monitor
several worlds for interesting events and switch to the world that is
currently the most interesting.
When I was thinking about this, I remembered talking to a MUD addicted
friend of mine several years ago in Manchester. He once mentioned that it
was relatively common practice for people he knew to simultaneously have
connections to several different MUDS and switch their attention between
them. Users might do this because they wanted to keep up to date on the
state of several MUDs or because the connections were really
slow and so they would be entering commands on one connection whilst
waiting for a response from another connection. He also mentioned some
users who would be simultaneously controlling several characters on the
same MUD.
Anyway, it occured to me that this was similar to some of the ideas I'd
been thinking about for VR and I wondered if any of the people on the list
who had experiences of MUDs might be able to help me out on this or had
some comments.
Are there any papers, reports that document the practice of using several
MUDs (MOOs etc) or several characters on the same MUD simultaneously?
How easy do people find it to switch their attention between characters?
Is this a widespread practice? Are there any other reasons why people might
use MUDs in this way that I haven't mentioned?
thanks
Dave
Dave Snowdon
Communications Research Group Tel: +44 (0)115 9514226
Department of Computer Science Fax: +44 (0)115 9514254
The University of Nottingham E-mail: dns@cs.nott.ac.uk
Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK <http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/~dns/dave.html>
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