Characterizing user mobility in Second Life

La, Chi Anh; Michiardi, Pietro
SIGCOMM 2008, ACM Workshop on Online Social Networks, August 18-22, 2008, Seattle, USA

In this work we present a measurement study of user mobil- ity in Second Life. We first discuss 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 similar results to those obtained in real-world experiments, we study the statistical distribu- tion of user contacts and show that user mobility in Second Life presents similar traits to those of real humans. We fur- ther push our analysis to radio networks that emerge from user interaction and show that they are highly clustered. Lastly, we focus on the spatial properties of user movements and observe that users in Second Life revolve around several points of interest traveling in general short distances. Using maximum likelihood estimation, we show that our empirical data best fit to power-law with cutoff distributions, indicating that contact time distributions in a virtual envi- ronment has very similar characteristics to those observed in real-world experiments.


DOI
Type:
Conférence
City:
Seattle
Date:
2008-08-18
Department:
Data Science
Eurecom Ref:
2504
Copyright:
© ACM, 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in SIGCOMM 2008, ACM Workshop on Online Social Networks, August 18-22, 2008, Seattle, USA http://doi.acm.org.gate6.inist.fr/10.1145/1397735.1397753

PERMALINK : https://www.eurecom.fr/publication/2504