 Hello everyone and welcome to the 5 o'clock to 5.30 p.m. session of the 2023 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are pleased to introduce the presentation Do You Know Who I Am? Avatars and Identities. Our speakers are Bethany Winslow and Marie Vanz whose am Vanz Lapis. Bethany Winslow is the Director of Online Learning for the School of Information at San Jose State University. Marie Vanz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at Colorado State University where her research is focused on the use of augmented and virtual reality for education. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the session and the full schedule of events. This session is being live streamed and recorded so if you have questions or comments you may send tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag pound oscc23. Welcome everyone, let's begin the session. Okay, hopefully you can hear me. You sound great. Okay, good evening and welcome to our talk titled Do You Know Who I Am? Assumptions about Avatars and Identities. My name is Marie Vanz in the physical world and am Vanz Lapis in the metaverse. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at Colorado State University as well as an adjunct faculty member of San Jose State University iSchool. My co-presenter is Bethany Winslow in the physical world and Bethany the virtual version in the metaverse. Bethany is the Director of Online Learning at San Jose State University School of Information. So our short presentation today will cover four main points including what sparked this project Do You Know Who I Am? What we think might be going on? What do we think? How we go about figuring that out? Let's study this and how can you get involved? We need your help. Let's start with a story. Once upon a time a CSU Colorado State University researcher wanted to create a 3D space where students could come and learn about mental health resources. She showed it to about 200 people who all loved it and thought it was amazing to be able to walk around as an avatar and interact with content that could get students in touch with the resources they need. And this is what this wonderful place looks like. It's located in Spatial.io and it's basically a 3D website that allows students to come in and see what the university offers in the way of mental health resources. But then the 201st person who came in got a default affidavit that looked like this on the screen. Unfortunately this person had never been in a virtual environment before, saw my avatar with non-functional katana swords on her back and then noticed the avatar they came in with was wearing a hijab. And immediately assumed that the avatars, all the avatars were sexualized, stereotypical and for the avatar they had an assassin. The belt on her leg became the silent assassin's knife. As a result the entire site was shut down and not made public when it was supposed to. But here are a few of the other sexualized, in quotes, stereotypical, in quotes, violent, non- inclusive default avatars that you can get in Spatial. And of course I'm being sarcastic here. Spatial.io community guidelines say that at Spatial we prioritize safety, diversity, inclusion, and authenticity. We encourage creators to celebrate what makes them unique and viewers to engage what inspires them. And we believe that a safe environment helps everyone express themselves openly. And we deeply value the global nature of our community and we strive to take into account the breadth of cultural norms where we operate, which happens to be around the world. You'll notice these default, but yeah, that's true that some of these are ready player me avatars because they work with Spatial. But these are default avatars. These are the ones that you can get when you just jump in. But you'll notice that these default avatars are very diverse. And as are these male avatars. Okay, but the story does have a happy ending. We reached out to Spatial and told them of our concerns, and they changed the default avatar for everyone who uses the platform. It is no longer possible to get that assassin quote unquote avatar by mistake when you first jump into Spatial. Now you have to go out of your way to recreate her if you want. But what this experience taught us is that people who have never been in one of these virtual spaces have all kinds of biases and they see things that aren't even there. As longtime virtual worlds inhabitants, we became curious about the assumptions and biases people bring into these worlds based on their experiences with them. So our working hypothesis are that there is a correlation between the level of experience working in virtual environments and a lower degree of bias about the person behind the avatar. More specifically, a person who has never interacted in a virtual environment with other avatars will make assumptions about the person based on the appearance of their avatar. A person who has spent several years in virtual environments interacting with other avatars will not make assumptions about the person based on the appearance of their avatar. So our project seeks to determine whether we can show that these hypotheses are true. So I'm now going to turn this over to this presentation over to Bethany so she can explain how we are planning to do this. Great. Thanks so much, Marie. I hope you guys can hear me fine. Using a browser based VR room to illustrate this topic was an easy choice for us. Marie and I have talked at this conference before a few years back about Mozilla Hubs rooms as sort of a gateway drug, if you will, to help onboard people who are new to virtual environments so that they could experience the power of them firsthand. At the iSchool, we started using Mozilla Hubs about two years ago. Our programs are 100% online and we felt this was the easiest way to allow all of our students, faculty and staff the opportunity to explore VR because no accounts or special equipment is needed. But I found that even when I have advertised this opportunity widely, interest in all things virtual still remains a really niche thing. Even when the American Library Association considers VR an important trend, our students are not beating a path to it. Most of the students who come this way seem to identify as gamers. That's just anecdotal on my part, but it seems to me that those students who do get involved just like this audience here, we don't represent the average person. But Marie and I knew we wanted to create a Hubs room to illustrate the range of avatars and the diversity of the real people behind them. Even before we started to think about this as a research study. Honestly, this idea just started out as a contribution to the iSchools Band and Controversial Gallery that's shown on the screen here. Band books is something all librarians understand. But band avatars, not so much. Marie, the next slide please. So after the debacle with the avi with the hijab, Marie and I had several conversations about the different avatars we've used over the years and those we've seen our colleagues and students use. We thought maybe we'd have some kind of interactive exercise of some sort in the virtual gallery where participants could maybe choose the avatar that they thought best matched a real demographic profile. For example, a 58 year old white female educator who teaches a graduate level course on young adult fiction in a library sciences program. Would people with more experience in world be more creative in their avatar choices than someone with little to no experience? Now this slide shows my own second life avatar that I specifically addressed and I really like precisely because it is my very professional librarian look in avatar and this is how I really look in most classrooms or library settings. If I was teaching a course on young adult fiction, I might want to replicate some character like the other avi. The other one is my riff on a Laura Croft Furiosa tank girl kind of avatar. But what would most new users choose? Which one looks like a real librarian, right? I think most people would pick the the normal one in advance. The slide for me, please, Marie. Thank you. So we ended up scaling down really grand ambitions for a big complex virtual reality gallery and we just started with gathering a few examples from our VR Exploders list. We asked for volunteers who would be willing to go public with their real names and identities. Now all of us here are comfortable in this space. If you're wearing, you know, the hippo avatar or some other weird or unconventional avatar, nobody here bats an eye. The opportunities to express the different layers of our identities. It's just part of the culture that we take for granted in here, but I'm sure you can all remember what it was like to be a newbie about how alien all of this was at first. It's just, you know, it's there's so many different communities and identities. It's like multiverse is in this metaverse, but social and cultural change doesn't happen overnight. So this kind of project is about trying to identify and understand the disconnects. Especially for the people who are going to be new in these environments. We think we've got a culture war now in the physical world. Let's add the interest and adoption of social VR right now. And the landscape is shifting more quickly than ever. For newbies, it really is going to be everything everywhere all at once. Next slide, please. So in some ways, this is just the beginning. A few weeks ago, Fortnite restricted half their skins and emotes, which apparently caused a bit of an uproar among their user base. The Fortnite situation was part of a larger rollout of region ratings. And so if you go somewhere G rated, some of your stuff doesn't work anymore. And there were some users that have been complaining, however, that some of those restrictions don't actually make sense. You know, having a gun is an obvious thing to ban, but who's going to determine what's acceptable or not on a large scale? Will people be inclined to view the cool straps on our cyberpunk outfits as bandoliers? Can any of us agree on what constitutes any number of things? What is sexism or cultural appropriation, for example? So this slide shows a couple screenshots of our avatars and identities gallery. And we put the link to the survey that we created in the room itself, but we didn't want to just show randomly generated avatars. We wanted visitors to know that these are real people. So the inquiry questions that are in the room help of visitors to more deeply engage with this topic. You land in the room in front of a mirror and immediately the questions begin. A person might see themselves for the first time embodied as an avatar. The mirror literally and figuratively invites self reflection. Who are you? How do you see yourself? And each avatar in the room also poses various questions of the avatar. Am I dressed inappropriately? How could you define me? How old do you think I am? Who defines what it means to be authentic? What is my real gender identity? Do I look like an educator? What do you assume about me? Am I obligated to present myself in a certain way? Knowing that they're real people on the other side of these avatars, we think makes these reflection questions a great primer for then taking our survey. Marie, you can go to the next slide. Yes, and we've got that copy. Thank you. So what exactly are we trying to measure? Words like assumptions or bias are loaded, but they're nebulous. Speaking of avatars and identities, Marie and I are like snarky and sass shown here, getting all excited and gathering ideas like chip monks gather acorns, and we should have been prepared to change into squirrel avis and throw a bunch of question marks all over the stage. Sorting out all of the question options and deciding on the format was harder than we expected. We thought we'd show a collage of our participants avatars with hot spots on them and then have people try and match the avatar to the real biographic information, even just, but you know that's not meaningful data, even just thinking about how to code specific visual representations as a challenge. For example, what shade of skin is going to be the correct one to represent in general a person of color? So years ago there weren't that many options to be a virtual person, but the options have grown exponentially since then. How many of us here now have multiple avatars in multiple virtual environments right now? But you can only ask so many questions on a survey and you can only show so many representative quote-unquote avatars. What we really wanted to measure is the confidence someone has in making assumptions. Do they assume anything about ethnic identity? Do they assume if a person is a teenager or what would they assume about gender? Or we can go to the next slide, thanks. Now do they assume anything about ethnic identity? You know that's sort of those sort of questions. We finally decided on a collection of these questions that broadly speaking does two things. First, it gathers a person's feelings about using an avatar for themselves, even if they're brand new, just hypothetically, and second, to indicate their level of confidence in specific scenarios with some stock avatar photos. So we've got 17 questions total. Most of them are on a five-point Likert scale, multiple choice. We have 12 questions that solicit things like the participants chosen, gender identity, their age, how much experience they have with using avatars, and it didn't even occur to me until recently to wonder if we shouldn't also be asking questions about sexuality. But we are trying to focus on just one research question. Are people with less experience in virtual worlds more likely to have biased assumptions about the avatars they see and what kind of person inhabits those avis? So the last five questions so show some pictures of avatars and ask the survey taker to indicate their level of confidence in making what we think are pretty generic assumptions. For example, with this Hellboy avatar shown, what do you guys think? Maybe put in chat what you think Anubi would think of this avi. Do you think they assume the person behind the avatar is younger and more likely to be male? See, Lear even says he's cute. I agree, he is cute. Actually, the next slide please Marie. But after a person has visited our gallery and taken the survey, they get a link to a second gallery and that one is called behind the avatar and visitors can see the real people who contributed to this project. But we need more if we're going to really represent the full range of diversity that exists. So we're hoping some of you might want to get involved. We also haven't found any good research yet that addresses this topic precisely. So please do let us know if you know of any and please do visitor our booth. We have information there so that you can visit our hubs room. We do hope you'll take our survey and don't miss the second gallery to meet some of our participants. Marie and I really want to say a big thank you to our colleagues and you know they've contributed this information. We've got a last slide here with our contact information and so we just we're hoping to report on early results at the VWBPE conference in Second Life in March but we also want to get IRB approval to really do this on a large scale. This is sort of a prototype at this point but we're really hoping to define it so and do a formal study and publish our results. Our note card giver in the booth has links to more information and I think we may have a minute to answer any questions. Booth 11 yes thank you so much everyone. And thank you Bethany and Marie for an informative and interesting presentation. Please give them your comments and questions in the text chat. As a reminder to our audience you will want to check out the conference.opensimilar.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session which will be at five thirty in this keynote region and it's entitled Supercar a versatile and low impact land vehicle scripting system.