Towards a virtual environment for regulated interaction using the social theatres model

Abstract

The last decade brought about several virtual communities spread all over the world composed of thousands of people with different ages and social, cultural and physical characteristics. These communities enable users to communicate and share information, often with the aim of achieving a common goal. Due to the vast diversity of users there's often a need to control the activities that occur inside the virtual environment to avoid inappropriate behaviors. However, this control can cause a feeling of digital surveillance, but an appropriate design of the interface can help minimize its impact, becoming an important success factor for the community. For this purpose we analyzed a selection of virtual environments, conducted a survey on users' preferences and analyzed the corresponding results. From these activities we defined a set of requirements to build a 3D interface for a regulated virtual environment. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.