Open-sourcing SL … for market research
By Adam Reuters
Mario Menti (Second Life name: Mario Sonic) has a day job at a market research software firm GMI, and he’s been playing with the newly open-sourced client to create an automated data collection mode for conducting surveys:
It goes like this: the interviewer logs into Second Life with the modified viewer, and goes around looking for respondents. At this point everything is as usual, they can walk, fly, chat etc. just like anyone else. Once they find someone, they may ask them if they were willing to take a survey. If the respondent agrees - and here’s the clever bit, such as it is - the interviewer can switch their avatar to a “data collection” mode, so the avatar automatically starts saying the questions as they have been defined in the survey back-end, and the answers from the respondent are automatically recorded in the survey back-end too. Once the survey is finished, they’re back to a “normal” Second Life user.
Mario’s blog has a sample video of his efforts.
