Connecting web to interactive virtual world

Abstract

Virtual worlds have shown their presence for a long time since virtual reality

comes into people's sight. Currently research has indicated that virtual worlds

highly rely on the richness of storylines and content to allow social structure

building and social interaction. While most of the virtual worlds nowadays are

still developed for game purposes, social interaction and relationship building

appears to be in a poor state in virtual worlds.

On the other hand, Web 2.0 has been adapted for online social interaction.

By emphasizing peer's social interaction and collective intelligence, Web 2.0

services have offered great opportunities to leverage on the web technology to

engage people more effectively.

The purpose of this research is to discover a possible solution to improve

social interaction experiences in virtual worlds for participants with the

integration of Web 2.0 services. The following research questions are addressed:

• What is virtual world (MMORPG) and what are the factors influencing

users' interests in the virtual world?

• What are the current Web 2.0 services and how could they help promoting

virtual worlds?How could we connect the Web to these virtual worlds?

To answer these questions, detailed review on virtual world/MMORPG and

Web 2.0 is conducted to discover their current state and issues. A research

conceptual model with assumptions is built to use social networking and sharing

services to connect to virtual worlds in order to boost users' social experience;

justifications on the assumptions are carried out using extended literature review

and survey instrument. Analysis of the survey also reveals a negative correlation

between virtual world and social networking participation. With the needs to

improve this negative correlation and virtual worlds' participants' social

interaction, the conceptual research model is implemented using Java and

Unity3D development environment and tested accordingly.

A discussion on the research model and survey is then carried out to identify

the efforts which can improve social structure building in virtual worlds. Last,

limitations of the research are identified and future work to be done is

recommended.