eLab - University of California, Riverside

eLab City

eLab City is currently under development in Second Life. It will be open to the public in May or June 2008. We will also be launching a new survey and experiment panel of Second Life users in eLab City.

Visit the eLab City Ning site.

The eLab City Project

UC Riverside’s eLab City development in Second Life allows people to be someone else in another world while researchers study consumer behavior. In the first half of 2008, consumers can make a new life for themselves in an online community offered through eLab City at UCR’s Sloan Center. Second Life provides an excellent platform for study because it’s the most socially and economically complex virtual world environment to date.

Most academic simulations in Second Life are “virtual campuses” oriented to classroom instruction and course support. There are, however, no academic Second Life projects devoted to studying how consumers behave in virtual worlds. eLab City will be a platform for the academic study of virtual consumption. Modeled as a “live-work-play” community, eLab City will provide a working laboratory and subject pool for academic research.

Pre-built virtual residential apartments and virtual office space in Second Life will be provided for periods of time to those involved with the eLab City project at no charge. eLab City will also house a consumer lab, library, conference rooms, survey space, resident-run shops, a cinema, auditorium, conference room,s concert stage, and an exhibition hall for art, design and fashion shows. The opening show at eLab City’s exhibition hall in Spring 2008, “Virtual Virtual,” will feature original work by noted digital artist Peter Stanick.

As an academic research facility and platform, eLab City combines a panel of Second Life users, survey and experimental research capabilities, and tools for unobtrusively tracking user behavior given informed consent.

The UCR Sloan Center is currently collaborating with the London office of GMI (Global Market Insite, Inc.), a provider of global market intelligence solutions, to develop eLab City’s online academic panel of Second Life residents. A second project conducted in collaboration with GMI uses automated “survey bots” to approach and interview Second Life residents.

Through the UCR Sloan Center, eLab City will provide a vehicle for companies to sponsor cutting edge academic research. Similar to the early years of the commercial Web in the mid 1990s, companies today are struggling to understand how virtual worlds will play out in the coming years. eLab City hopes to offer some answers.

The list of areas of study is immense. elab City hopes to study peer/social influence, decision making, virtual consumption, group behavior, merchandizing, branding, research methodology and social capital among others.