photo of about a dozen similar looking male avatars all dressed in black

Open call to participate in a study on avatar identity through USC!!

   2012/09/06  5 Comments on Open call to participate in a study on avatar identity through USC!!  Posted in Avatar
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photo of about a dozen similar looking male avatars all dressed in black
image: Isabelle Bülthoff / Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (not from Kamil Kurri’s USC Study)

A friend of mine at USC in California is doing an avatar identity study. He only needs 4 more avatars and you can  make 1000L

Please read the info below and contact him if you are interested 🙂 Thanks so much :))

This is an open call to members of Second Life who have used their avatar for at least 1 year to participate in a virtual behavioral study conducted by the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.   Participants must use their personal avatar for this study and be fluent in English.

If you volunteer to participate in this study, you will be asked to engage in a memorization task while watching your avatar perform an activity for less than 6 minutes.  You will also fill out web questionnaires regarding your personality, preferences, and activities prior to the task.  One questionnaire will follow 24 hours after finishing the task.  No identifiable private information will be collected or retained.  No “real life” personal names will be collected.  Avatar names will be collected and retained only for the purpose of sending links to the questionnaires and disclosing the nature of the study.  These avatar names will not be available to anyone outside the members of the USC ICT Staff necessary for this study’s completion.

After the completion of the 24 hour questionnaire, you will be compensated 1000 Linden dollars paid directly to their avatar’s account.  Specific avatar names will be destroyed upon conclusion of the study and will not be published.

Participants will be free to cease participation at any time without penalty.  There are no known adverse effects and therefore minimal risk from participating.  Full disclosure of the study’s purpose will be provided after the study has concluded.

Contact Kamil Kurri in SL to participate.

Author: Kristine Schomaker
Kristine Schomaker is a new media and performance artist, painter and art historian living and working at the Brewery artist complex in Los Angeles. For over 14 years she has been working with various interdisciplinary art forms including online virtual worlds to explore identity and the hybridization of digital media with the physical world. Whether virtual or physical, the object-based work Kristine creates combines elements of color-based gestural abstraction, animation, pattern and design, neo-Baroque and Populence. Using installation, text, photography, mixed media, video and performance for her ongoing conceptual project My Life as an Avatar, she visualizes a narrative/dialogue with her virtual persona, Gracie Kendal. Kristine then documents her experiences on her blog. In 2012, exploring ideas of community, Kristine turned a local gallery into a modern day creation of Gertrude Stein’s salon of the 1920’s with a live mixed-reality dinner party merging the physical world with the online virtual world. Over the summer she also performed The Bald and the Beautiful in which she had her head shaved as a statement to challenge society’s standards of beauty. Currently, Kristine is working as an Artist-in-Residence through the Linden Endowment for the Arts creating an immersive virtual environment which she is planning to bring into the physical world via sculpture/public art work.

5 thoughts on “Open call to participate in a study on avatar identity through USC!!”

  3. kk USA-is-the-center-of-the-universers, I’ve changed the date formatting for iRez from DD-MM-YYYY, which is what confused you, to, well, actually, it’s still DD-MM-YYYY, but we’re now spelling out the month for better clarity.

    So, instead of what you saw:
    06/09/2012

    it is now:
    Thursday, 06 September 2012

    I took the opportunity to also change the way time stamps work on iRez. We’ve actually been on CEST all this time, a holdover of the old “Vaneeesa.com” days.

    Having our group, Virtual Salon, on Netherlands time doesn’t really make sense, having it on “SLT” doesn’t work for our “many worlds” focus either, so I chose the closest thing I could think of to “neutral time,” GMT.
    (to the joy, no doubt, of UK-is-the-center-of-the-universers! 😛

    Actually, WordPress doesn’t have GMT, so I chose UTC. If you’re not familiar, UTC is to GMT sort of like BCE is to BC.

    You’ll see the DATE only on Posts, and then down here on Comments, you’ll see date and time

    [caption id="attachment_13674" align="alignnone" width="400"]Photo of "The Prime Meridian," a red line painted on the door at the Greenwich Observatory Prime Meridian, photo by John Victor Cooper[/caption]

    Reply

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