SLMeetingRoom: A Model of Environment to Remote Support Meetings, Oriented Tasks with Small Groups for Second Life Cintia Ramalho Caetano da Silva Fluminense Federal University Niterói, RJ, BRA ccaetano@ic.uff.br Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia Fluminense Federal University Niterói, RJ, BRA bicharra@ic.uff.br Joel Maurício Corrêa da Rosa Fluminense Federal University Niterói, RJ, BRA joel@addlabs.uff.br Abstract - 3D virtual worlds are typically designed to reproduce the physical world, both in the features of the meeting place and also in how people interact with each other. We try to get a better understanding of technical and behavioral issues found in different meeting environments designed for collaborative work. From the problems that we have found, we proposed the SLMeetingRoom, as a model of environment for work meetings which is composed of a set of components to support basic working activities in Second Life. We also performed a pilot study under four different conditions of communication: face-to- face, videoconference, Second Life without the SLMeetingRoom and Second Life with the SLMeetingRoom. The pilot study pointed out that the SLMeetingRoom model is a promising environment according to the criteria: cognitive effort and sense of presence, however, for tasks completeness and participation level, we could not find statistical evidence to support our research hypotheses. Keywords - 3D virtual worlds, collaborative work, distributed meetings, Second Life, SLMeetingRoom. I. INTRODUCTION With the emergence of Web 3.0, the 3D virtual environments are gradually becoming more common as everyday tools [1], and as tools for holding meetings [1][2][3]. The most popular of them is Second Life, a 3D virtual environment simulation, used by thousands of users simultaneously, via interactions between their virtual characters, called avatars [4]. According to Olivier and Pinkwart [1], Second Life covers the most important aspects for synchronous communication, so important in the area of CSCW, such as perception and support for remote synchronous collaboration, allowing the Second Life to extend the limits of remote interaction through 3D models that offer huge potential for new forms of human interaction, cooperation and socialization. The problem addressed in this paper is that 3D virtual environments like Second Life do not support basic activities for the conduction task-oriented, remote and scheduled, meetings for small remote and non-anonymous groups. Second Life has a great potential to support collaborative work, mainly because it offers immersion to the participants, but on the other hand, it is not an environment which is designed to support the basic activities to perform meetings. The main hypothesis of this paper is that if we enrich the Second Life, providing an environment model with a set of essential components to support remote meetings, scheduled and task-oriented, with small groups, remotes and non- anonymous, we may get results closer to the face-to-face, i.e., the task performance degree, group participation, cognitive effort and sense of presence, will be closer to face-to-face group ("gold standard") than groups using the traditional videoconference systems and Second Life without any tools for support meetings. Thus, we propose to create an environment model to support the basic activities of meetings, called SLMeetingRoom. The SLMeetingRoom constitutes a meeting room in Second Life, a 3D virtual environment, and is composed of the following components: whiteboard, agenda, task tracking schedule, information repository, model of argumentation, Social Proxy, voting, gestures panel, stopwatch and presence list. Thus, we seek to understand what happens in remote meetings using the technology of 3D virtual environments, and how to support work meetings mediated by these environments, as well as the participants' behavior while using the environment. II. RELATED WORK The tendency of people to come together and form groups is inherent in the structure of today's society. When a group is given a task, there are many ways that they can follow to accomplish this task [5]. One of these ways of working is the meeting which gathers a group of people to communicate and interact together to achieve common goals and objectives [2][6]. According to [2], meetings are the only effective mechanism that allows for problem solving and consensus building. A meeting can be classified as face-to-face or remote (distributed), planned (scheduled in advance) or unscheduled (occurring spontaneously) [7][8]. Another kind of meeting is the task-oriented, usually held in small groups in order to generate results at the end of each section. A task-oriented