The internet revolutionized communication and enabled new ways of interaction that were previously un-thought of.

When I was young, I often felt disconnected from the people around me and unfortunately, at that time, there was no internet. Luckily, once I got to college there was UNIX “talk” (an early instant messaging like application), which quickly became a big favourite of mine.

Today, the range of interaction possibilities open to us are quite amazing. We can find people to talk about pretty much anything; we can buy and sell stuff to people all over the world; we can share information, events, and experiences (photos, videos); and we can even share virtual experiences in fantastical worlds where we can be an elven princess or a space pirate.

These virtual worlds really captured my heart and many many many hours of my time.

In college, I was addicted to MUDs (Multi User Dungeons). These are the precursors to the now very popular massively multi-player RPGs (Role Playing Games) such as World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Final Fantasy Online.

These “games” are now serious business, with the World of Warcraft community numbering about 9 million subscribers as of July 2007.

In addition to providing subscribers with a large, rich, and beautiful 3D world to explore, these online worlds also encourage social interaction, cooperation, and competition among their players. I have spent a lot of time on the Sentinels server in World of Warcraft and the Valefor server in Final Fantasy Online.

Mages Rule!

These new possibilities of human interaction enable many interesting new frontiers that have yet to be explored. Below are some areas I started to explore while I was at Accenture Technology Labs.

Socialization of Devices

Even though social interaction through the World Wide Web is now such an important part of everyday life, it is still mostly confined to our computers and phones.

This unnecessarily limits social interaction to particular activities and times of the day, e.g. when we are in the office, when we are on our computers, when our phone rings.

If we look around us, we are surrounded by many other objects, e.g. chairs, tables, television sets, refrigerator, microwave ovens, etc., each of which have different functions and each of which are tied to a variety of different tasks and activities.

The socialization of devices project considers adding social affordances to many of these everyday objects so that the socialization process can be a fluid process that extends to everything that we do, at anytime during the day.

• Online Playroom
  In BusinessWeek, July 2006.

Reality Instant Messaging

Online chat technologies such as instant messaging and SMS have become extremely popular. Online chat environments, however, are missing a key ingredient that we take for granted in physical world chat – reality.

When we socialize in the physical world we are surrounded by colorful and interesting events, e.g. a sporting event, a music concert, or an interesting drama on television. These events become conversational devices that play a crucial role in driving and facilitating social interaction.

The Reality Instant Messaging project injects these reality events back into online chat.

In this way we enhance the reality streams by tying them to a social context, and at the same time we enhance the social environment by giving people something to talk about.

• Going Virtual
  In Forbes Magazine, September 2003.
• Reality Instant Messaging: Injecting a Dose of Reality into Online Chat
  Mei Chuah,
  In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’03) extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2003, pp. 926 – 927.
• Visualizing Common Ground
  Mei Chuah, Steven Roth,
  In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information Visualization (IV’03), July 2003, pp. 365-372.
• Reality Instant Messenger: The Promise of iTV Delivered Today
  Mei Chuah,
  In Proceedings of the AHA 2002 Workshop on Personalization in Future TV, 2002.

Virtual Image

In the Virtual Image project we examine the importance of fashion in online communities.

Fashion is obviously very important in real world communities. What you wear and how you look can significantly affect your social interactions and social standing.

Every year people spend billions of dollars on clothing and cosmetics, to look better. This importance transfers to online social groups as well. Today, many online communities allow us to craft our online “look” and “sound”.

Ring tones, for example, are already a multi-billion dollar industry.

In this project we examined the role and importance of fashion in online RPGs.

We carried out a series of questionnaires to determine the types of fashion (i.e. visual personalization) that are most important and identified what monetary value people associate to fashion in online RPGs. We also logged many online hours within these communities, to observe the types of fashion items available, as well as how they affected social interaction and status.

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