This paper describes an experiment that compares behavior in small groups when its members carry out a task in a virtual environment (VE) and then continue the same task in a similar, real-world environment. The purpose of the experiment was not to examine task performance, but to compare various aspects of the social relations among the group members in the two environments. Ten groups of three people each, who had never met before, met first in a shared VE and carried out a task that required the identification and solution of puzzles that were presented on pieces of paper displayed around the walls of a room. The puzzle involved identifying that the same-numbered words across all the pieces of paper formed a riddle or saying. The group continued this task for fifteen minutes, and then stopped to answer a questionnaire. The group then reconvened in the real world and continued the same task. The experiment also required one of the group members to continually monitor a particular one of the others in order to examine whether social discomfort could be generated within a VE. In each group, there was one immersed person with a head-mounted display and head-tracking and two non-immersed people who experienced the environment on a workstation display. The results suggest that the immersed person tended to emerge as the leader in the virtual group, but not in the real meeting. Group accord tended to be higher in the real meeting than in the virtual meeting. Socially conditioned responses such as embarrassment could be generated in the virtual meeting, even though the individuals were presented to one another by very simple avatars. The study also found a positive relationship between presence of being in a place and copresence—the sense of being with the other people. Accord in the group increased with presence, the performance of the group, and the presence of women in the group. The study is seen as part of a much larger planned study, for which this experiment was used to begin to understand the issues involved in comparing real and virtual meetings.

The realism of avatars in terms of behavior and form is critical to the development of collaborative virtual environments. In the study we utilized state of the art, real-time face tracking technology to track and render facial expressions unobtrusively in a desktop CVE. Participants in dyads interacted with each other via either a video-conference (high behavioral realism and high form realism), voice only (low behavioral realism and low form realism), or an “emotibox” that rendered the dimensions of facial expressions abstractly in terms of color, shape, and orientation on a rectangular polygon (high behavioral realism and low form realism). Verbal and non-verbal self-disclosure were lowest in the videoconference condition while self-reported copresence and success of transmission and identification of emotions were lowest in the emotibox condition. Previous work demonstrates that avatar realism increases copresence while decreasing self-disclosure. We discuss the possibility of a hybrid realism solution that maintains high copresence without lowering self-disclosure, and the benefits of such an avatar on applications such as distance learning and therapy.

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This is a brief essay, we call "think-pieces", designed to stimulate a discussion on a particular topic. The topic for this series of essays is "defining virtual worlds".

The recent Facebook study about emotional contagion has generated a high-profile debate about the ethical and social issues in Big Data research. These issues are not unprecedented, but the debate highlighted that, in focusing on research ethics and the legal issues about this type of research, an important larger picture is overlooked about the extent to which free will is compatible with the growth of deterministic scientific knowledge, and how Big Data research has become central to this growth of knowledge. After discussing the ‘emotional contagion study’ as an illustration, these larger issues about Big Data and scientific knowledge are addressed by providing definitions of data, Big Data and of how scientific knowledge changes the human-made environment. Against this background, it will be possible to examine why the uses of data-driven analyses of human behaviour in particular have recently experienced rapid growth. The essay then goes on to discuss the distinction between basic scientific research as against applied research, a distinction which, it is argued, is necessary to understand the quite different implications in the context of scientific as opposed to applied research. Further, it is important to recognize that Big Data analyses are both enabled and constrained by the nature of data sources available. Big Data research is bound to become more widespread, and this will require more awareness on the part of data scientists, policymakers and a wider public about its contexts and often unintended consequences.

Research has shown that citizens with populist attitudes evaluate the news media more negatively, and there is also suggestive evidence that they rely less on established news sources like the legacy press. However, due to data limitations, there is still no solid evidence whether populist citizens have skewed news diets in the contemporary high-choice digital media environment. In this paper, we rely on the selective exposure framework and investigate the relationship between populist attitudes and the consumption of various types of online news. To test our theoretical assumptions, we link 150 million Web site visits by 7,729 Internet users in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States to their responses in an online survey. This design allows us to measure media exposure more precisely than previous studies while linking these data to demographic attributes and political attitudes of participants. The results show that populist attitudes leave pronounced marks in people's news diets, but the evidence is heterogeneous and highly contingent on the supply side of a country's media system. Most importantly, citizens with populist attitudes visit less Web sites from the legacy press, while consuming more hyperpartisan news. Despite these tendencies, the Web tracking data show that populist citizens still primarily get their news from established sources. We

In this paper we present the results of a trial in which two participants collaborated on a puzzle-solving task in networked virtual environments. The task was a Rubik's cube type puzzle, and this meant that the two participants had to interact with the space and with each other very intensivelyFand they did this successfully despite the limitation of the networked situation. We compare collaboration in networked immersive projection technology (IPT's) systems with previous results concerning collaboration in an IPT system linked with a desktop computer, and also with collaboration on the same task in the real world. Our findings show that the task performance in networked IPT's and in the real scenario are very similar to each otherFwhereas IPT-to-desktop performance is much poorer. Results about participants' experience of 'presence', 'co-presence' and collaboration shed further light on these findings. r