Culture formation and its issues in personal agent-oriented virtual society: "PAWˆ2"

Abstract

In recent years, the combination of communication networks and computer technologies have made it possible to create a cyberspace on the Internet. Recently, several 3D shared virtual spaces and worlds have been developed in which users can share the same experience in a shared virtual environment [1][10]. The next important step is to extend these environments into a "virtual society." .To realize a virtual society, it is important to obtain a large number of users in a virtual world and evaluate various issues based on the populated world. For instance, what kind of functions (especially, social functions) and interface should be supported. For this purpose we constructed a personal agent-oriented virtual society called "PAW^2" (Personal Agent World) based on our CommunityPlace system [1][2].PAW^2 [3][4] is a 3D personal agent-oriented virtual society (Figure 1). PAW^2 has improved upon past virtual spaces based on avatar and text communication by providing autonomous personal agents that interact with users plus a social and environmental infrastructure (Figure 2). We have made several observations about the unique social phenomena in PAW^2 based on our experience operating the system. In this paper, we investigate these phenomena in detail by using non-participant observation method [7] and statistic method. According to the results of observation and statistic data, we clarify what sort of phenomenon that occurred. Then, we discuss the possibility of forming culture in a virtual society and its issues.