The present paper’s aim is to investigate how the participants of an online learning environment employed written language in a creative way through the spontaneous use of figurative language. The content analysis showed that figurative language was a means to express the social dimension either to refer to the self, feelings and emotions, or to conceptualize the components of the virtual learn...

In the current paper we hypothesize that providing peripheral awareness information to remotely located but socially close individuals will yield affective user benefits. An experiment in a controlled home-like environment was conducted to investigate the effects of providing different levels of peripheral awareness information on these affective benefits. In the experiment peripheral awareness...

Although the social relevance of digital gaming has been discussed and investigated in cultural and sociological readings, social context has been largely neglected in terms of in-game player experience. In this paper we present a study in which player experience is empirically tested comprehensively, with the focus on the interplay between player enjoyment and social context. Self reports on t...

In this paper we model the concept of ”coarseness”, typically used in texture image descriptions, by means of fuzzy sets. Specifically, we relate representative measures of this kind of texture with its presence degree. To obtain these ”presence degrees”, we collect assessments from polls filled by human subjects, performing an aggregation of these assessments by means of OWA operators. Using t...

This paper represents the current state of an action research approach to piece of “work in progress”, researching the use and usage of the Internet for marketing purposes by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The full paper discusses how the research was established, its design and development, and sets out clearly the operational parameters addressed. It also identifies through the de...

Presence Information Data Format (PIDF) defines a common presence data format for Common Profile for Presence (CPP) compliant presence protocols. This memo defines a PIDF extension to represent SIP User Agent capabilities. Lonnfors & Kiss Standards Track [Page 1] RFC 5196 User Agent Capability Presence Status September 2008 Table of

The Presence Information Document Format (PIDF) specifies the baseline XML-based format for describing presence information. One of the characteristics of the PIDF is that the document always needs to carry all presence information available for the presentity. In some environments where low bandwidth and high latency links can exist, it is often beneficial to limit the amount of transported in...

The study investigates how knowledge workers perceive avatar e-mail differently from traditional e-mail, and how they select traditional versus avatar e-mail when different levels of task equivocality and different types of communication direction are present. Three field studies were conducted with knowledge workers who have used avatar and traditional e-mail. This study demonstrates that over...

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as refer...

This paper describes reports on the results of an experiment designed to study the impact of realism on the reported presence in an immersive virtual environment. An experiment was carried out with 40 participants who were asked to walk through a virtual street, which had virtual characters walking through it. Two factors were varied – texture quality (2 levels) and virtual character realism (2...