Connecting web to interactive virtual world

• Main Author: Zhang, Qiushi
• Other Authors: Miao Chunyan
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/54545
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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.