Characterizing user mobility in Second Life

In this work we present a measurement study of user mobility in Second Life. We first discuss on different techniques to collect user traces and then focus on results obtained using a crawler that we built. Tempted by the question whether our methodology could provide sim- ilar results to those obtained in real-world experiments, we study the statistical distribution of user contacts and show that from a qualita- tive point of view user mobility in Second Life presents similar traits to those of real humans. We further push our analysis to study the properties of line of sight networks that emerge from user interaction as well as the spatial properties of user movements and observe that users in Second Life revolve around several point of interests traveling in general short distances