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Second Life Information Desk System using Instant
Messaging and Short Messaging Service
Technologies
S. Valério
UTAD – Engineering Department
Vila Real, Portugal
L. Morgado
GECAD/UTAD
Vila Real, Portugal
C. Serôdio
UTAD – Engineering Department
Vila Real, Portugal
J. Pereira
UTAD – Engineering Department
Vila Real, Portugal
P. Mestre
UTAD – Engineering Department
Vila Real, Portugal
F. Carvalho
PT Inovação
Aveiro, Portugal
Abstract — Organizations with a presence in the Second Life®
world typically only provide direct user interaction with staff at
specific schedules, or not at all. We present a system that
provides organizations with a simple way to enable constant
interaction with users of the Second Life world, by simulating
staff presence using automated avatars as communication
channels to real-life staff by means of instant messaging and
short message service technologies. Staff members are assigned to
communication with Second Life avatars based on a hierarchy of
information desk staffing priorities, and communication is
bidirectional.
Keywords – Information Desk, Help Desk, Second Life,
Messaging, SMS, virtual worlds
I. INTRODUCTION
Communications are a key element of everyday living. The emergence of Web 2.0 participatory technologies and the commoditizing of telecommunications services are making it easier for people to access services and information from different contexts and actively engage in on-line interactions. Businesses and organizations need to adapt and evolve within this landscape, leveraging the opportunities for enhanced and constant interaction with customers and users.
Information desks represent a specific situation where organizations need to interact at unscheduled times with a reasonable number of individuals, and each interaction is an opportunity for pursuing business and improving customer relationships. An information desk may provide information directly, or direct individuals to specific members of staff,
either in person or remotely, who may better cater for an individual’s information needs.
A major difference between physical-world and virtual information desks are that there is not typically a user expectation of staff presence. Thus, users search documents or input information requests in Web forms that can be handled with some flexibility in terms of feedback time.
Virtual worlds such as the Second Life world (SL) present a new challenge for information desks, in that users expect a virtual world space to be populated. Thus, organizations using virtual worlds face a new reality: the need for constant animation or staffing of virtual premises or the acceptance of defrauding expectations by providing deserted spaces [26]. This situation comes from the fact that while visiting a typical Web site a user is not expecting a shared experience; but in a virtual world, the constant feeling of being present within a space brings with it the notions of company or loneliness; of crowded spaces and deserted spaces.
Typical solutions for avoiding this involve organizing events in the virtual world space, so that users have a motivation to visit the space regularly, or even set aside specific areas solely for entertainment.
However, such solutions won’t solve the expectation of direct contact with a representative of the organization. But in order for a staff member to be on-line in SL, he/she needs to have the SL client software running on a computer, and pay attention to it regularly, to see if someone is attempting to establish contact. For most organizations, expectable avatar
This work was developed by the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto
Douro (UTAD), sponsored by Portugal Telecom Inovação, S.A.
traffic won’t likely justify the need for constant staffing of business spaces and information desks in this manner.
Several systems allow users to be present in SL without the 3D component, remaining accessible by instant messaging, but this exposes the internal information desk staffing organization to external users: queue can form, should several users wish to speak with the same staffer; or visitors are confronted with the need to choose from a selection of staffers (as explained in section VII), rather than simply approaching a generic information desk staffer.
The system we present here allows staff members to interact with virtual world avatars without having to use the virtual world client software or even a computer: instead, they use instant messaging software or cell-phone SMS services. They are free to do other tasks while no communication is taking place, and they can manage more than one conversation simultaneously. Also, when too many conversations are initiated, new ones can be automatically distributed to other staff members. All this takes place in a transparent way for virtual world users: from their point of view, they are in direct communication with the avatar of a staff member of the organization.
II. VIRTUAL WORLDS
Multi-user virtual worlds are experiencing a surge in usage, with millions of users worldwide [33], and hundreds of commercial products available [5], including many three-dimensional, graphics-intensive worlds, e.g. the aforementioned SL and also game worlds such as World of Warcraft [29]. These spaces have been exploited by various organizations, for uses as diverse as contacting potential customers, brand awareness, e-commerce, and collaboration tool for employees or business partners [6][25]. They can be seen as places for conducting simulations, for cooperative work, for communication.
Virtual world technology may be used to create a custom virtual world from scratch, using various toolkits (e.g., [1], [23]), an approach that organizations can pursue for special-purpose applications or private spaces for their employees; but services and applications can also be built on top of existing virtual worlds, either through development agreements with companies hosting virtual worlds or by using software components and libraries to connect external systems with those virtual worlds (e.g., [17]). This latter approach leverages technological support for issues like user concurrency and server bandwidth, and also allows services and applications reachable to users already found in those worlds. This approach is more adequate where widespread adoption is intended, where there will be limited control over the technical context of virtual world users, and for outreach activities that aim to leverage the skills of current users.
Development for existing virtual worlds employs combinations of world-side elements (software executed by virtual world servers), client-side elements (software running on users’ computers) and exo-world elements, software running on other servers (e.g., Web services – [22], [27]).
Among current virtual world platforms, SL has had a foremost presence in past few years in both the media, business use, and research. Unlike most virtual worlds, SL is freeform: users can create their own content, empowered by legal terms of use that enable them to own intellectual property rights to their content. This includes programs to support user interaction with objects and for communication with external servers on the Internet. It is not the world with the most users, but still it presents remarkable statistics in terms of average simultaneous users (August 2008: 46.817 users/hour) and available virtual land (August 2008: 1834 km
2) [19]. For these
reasons we chose SL as the platform to implement the prototype of the system described here. Partly due to media impact, partly due to the features described above and others, increasingly organizations have been creating institutional or active presences in SL (e.g., BBC, Cisco, Dell, IBM, Mazda, Reuters, Universal, Wells Fargo) [32], even if in many cases there isn’t a clear objective other than brand awareness and acquiring know-how on the medium.
III. INSTANT MESSAGING
Instant messaging (IM) services are used extensively in organizations [7], allowing staff to be aware of when their contacts are present on-line and communicate directly, but without focusing solely on the conversation, as would be the case with a phone call.
The main IM services, by number of users [10], are Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk. There are also some widely-used services in national/regional markets, such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) in the North-American market [10] or Sapo Messenger in the Portuguese market [8]. Most of these services employ different communication protocols for communication between user client applications and the IM service servers: MSNP (“Microsoft Notification Protocol”), YMSG (“Yahoo! Messenger Protocol”), XMPP (“Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol”, formerly “Jabber”), and OSCAR (“Open System for CommunicAtion in Realtime”). Most of these are proprietary, albeit reverse engineering efforts do exist. XMPP, however, is an open protocol, used by GoogleTalk, Sapo Messenger, and many other IM services.
IV. COMMUNICATING BETWEEN SL AND THE OUTSIDE
There are two main options to establish a communication channel between the outside world and SL: one can use the SL client software to create scripted objects and activate then; or develop programs running on external computer systems that access the SL world as automated alternative client software.
A. Comunications using scripted SL objects
The SL environment is made of virtual lands organized as regions and parcels, which may hold avatars and objects. The latter can contain different resources, including scripts that are executed by the SL servers’ software (not the client software). Scripts are written in Linden Scripting Language (LSL) [21] and among their abilities is communication with systems external to SL.
Scripts can communicate in three different ways [16]: sending and receiving email, responding to external calls by means of a remote procedure call mechanism (XML-RPC), and message exchange using the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The features of these communication methods are synthesized in Table I.
TABLE I. COMMUNICATION METHODS AVAILABLE IN SL SCRIPTS
Method Who initiates
communication
Message
length
Execution
delay
E-Mail Anyone
(script/external system) 4096 chars 20 seconds
XML-RPC External system 254 chars 3 seconds
HTTP
request LSL script 2048 chars None
When an email is sent by an LSL script [2] (Fig. 1) an identification of the object that contained that script is included in the e-mail address as [email protected]. In order to respond (or initiate other communications later), the external system only needs to use this email address. The email service of SL servers also includes in the email message body information such as the name of the object that contained the script generating the email and its location in the SL world.
Figure 1. SL-to-outside and outside-to-SL communications via email
The SL servers limit the frequency of outbound emails, for bandwidth management and to avoid being used as spam sources. Consequently, for delayed or low-throughput situations this method is adequate, but not for interactive or high-throughput applications.
The second method, XML-RPC, is provided by a dedicated server in the server grid of the SL world (Fig. 2). An external system can use it to invoke a script in SL, using the HTTP protocol and XML-encoded messages [3], as long as the script has previously opened a channel for message reception.
There are several disadvantages with the use of XML-RPC in SL. Besides the delay and short message size presented in Table 1, there is a scalability issue due to the existence of only one server in the SL world to process all such communications. Furthermore, this server only buffers one message per destination channel, which means that external systems must serialize message sending, i.e., wait for the response of a
message before sending the next. Finally, an open XML-RPC channel is reset in various situations, such as updates of server software or server resets [15]. This also makes XML-RPC in SL inadequate for high-throughput or interactive applications.
Figure 2. Outside-to-SL communications via XML-RPC
The third method, communication using HTTP message exchange is employed by invoking LSL scripting functions to make an HTTP request and process HTTP responses (Fig. 3). This means that communications by this method must always be initiated by the script (although plans for accepting HTTP requests from the outside have been announced by Linden Lab, the company who developed and manages SL). HTTP requests are not hindered by SL servers in terms of communication speed; nevertheless, they are throttled to a maximum of 25 requests per 20 seconds, supporting a sustained rate of 1 per second or a burst of up to 25 [20].
Figure 3. SL-to-outside communications via HTTP message exchange
B. Communications using alternative client software
The source code of the SL client software is open, as is the protocol for communicating between SL clients and SL servers. This allows developers to create custom clients for special purposes: for instance, a software system can employ a custom client to access the SL world as if it were a human user and perform any action that is available for human users. The most streamlined approach in this direction is to employ an open source software development library, libopenmv
(formerly libsecondlife), which provides most of the functionality available in the client.
Obviously, communications using software that relies on libopenmv must be started by systems external to SL, since there is no method internal to SL to “force” an avatar to login.
A disadvantage in the use of libopenmv regarding the previous method of LSL scripts is that eventually the library needs updating. The protocol for communication between SL clients and servers is updated regularly, and sometimes such updates impose a matching update to client software. This
means that applications using previous versions of libopenmv must be reinstalled or rebuilt using an updated version.
V. IM SYSTEMS AND SL
Several systems/products exist for communication between SL and outside systems by instant messaging. Possibly the most obvious is SLim, a special-purpose SL client that accesses the SL grid without the 3D engine and allows users to send and receive instant messages [18]. A similar application is SLeek, which allows users to do other simple tasks besides messaging – e.g., check their inventory [11]. There are also similar, but Web-based, alternatives, such as ajaxlife.net and
movablelife.net. Users are in effect logged in SL while using SLim, SLeek or the Web alternatives mentioned, and there is no connection to non-SL IM networks, so users will need other IM client software on their machines.
That connection is available in GnomiChat (formerly SL Messenger). This product, while also linking itself to SL as a special-purpose SL client, allows the user to import contacts from accounts in various IM networks and thus conduct all conversations in the same messaging application [14].
A problem when using these systems for information desks, however, is that they disclose the identity of their users to visitors. Thus, should an organization wish to maintain a common channel between visitors and several staff members, that organization would have to allow staff members to have common access to the organization’s avatar password, and log-out/log-in to pass over the service from a staff member to another. In case too many people approach the information desk at the same time, they will have to wait their turn, because in effect there is only one person in charge of all communications.
IBM provides a software development kit that employs bots to integrate SL communication with the IM system of Lotus Sametime (a groupware solution). This allows developers to create scripted SL objects to capture chat and send IM messages to Lotus Sametime users [9]. This technology is flexible, since it could be used to develop a system similar to the one we propose here, albeit restricted to Sametime users.
VI. SMS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS IN SL
A low-priority communication option of the information desk system presented here is that when no staff members are available in IM clients, the system relies on SMS messaging with cell-phones.
There are several SMS systems emerging in SL, developed by both telecommunication companies and individuals. These systems typically employ a scripted SL object that avatars can use as a “SL phone” to send and receive SMS messages or even establish voice calls. The main ones are Vodafone InsideOut, Swisscom Mobile’s phone booths, Telefonica’s SMS/MMS service and Switchboard.
Vodafone InsideOut users can send messages amongst themselves, that are routed by the service – by SL messaging if both parties are logged into SL, and by SMS if one if off-line. It also allows SL users to call (by voice) InsideOut users off-
line, in effect allowing avatars to make phone calls to physical cell phones [31]. It is not possible to communicate neither with non-InsideOut users nor for cell-phone users to initiate the communication.
Swisscom Mobile’s SMS service in SL is accessed by a phone booth object that is found in various locations (it’s free to copy and use). As in the Vodafone service, the user must initially make a registration [28]. This system only allows one avatar near the booth at a time to send SMS messages. There is no provision for receiving responses from outside SL.
That provision exists in Switchboard. This is an SMS system build on top of the SLoodle e-learning platform, which also allows SL avatars to send SMS messages to cell phones. Cell-phone users can then reply to those messages and the reply SMS is sent back to SL [13], moderated through a Web interface. There is no provision for cell-phone users to initiate a conversation. A different approach was taken by Comverse Technology, which developed an SL client able to run on cell-phones, integrating SMS functionality and other features [24]. Finally, the Spanish company Telefónica announced at the Mobile World Congress 2008 that it will provide a service able to receive and send SMS and MMS to and from SL [30].
These services are not yet modular enough for supporting a generic information system routing textual communications seamlessly between SL users and cell-phone users.
VII. INFORMATION DESK SYSTEMS IN SL
Many organizations use information desks in SL. One example presented in Fig. 4 is at the e-Justice Centre, a partnership between the Portuguese Ministry of Justice, and two universities, including a Law college, providing conflict mediation and resolution for users that are identifying only by their avatars [12].
There are two methods of interaction available. Within the announced scheduled, a member of staff is present in SL, waiting for people to show up and request conflict mediation or simply request general information. The other alternative is to create a plain text document (which in SL is called a “notecard”) and insert it into a “drop box”, which will deliver it for processing.
Figure 4. Information desk at the e-Justice Centre
Obviously, having a staff member on-line just waiting for potential visitors is not an efficient allocation of an organization’s resources, unless sufficient visitor traffic exists to support it. The “drop box” alternative, possibly one of the most common methods employed by organizations in SL for user contact, lacks the immediacy and effectiveness of direct contact; and, as explained in the opening section, does not contribute to an interactive experience in virtual facilities.
Another approach is to let visitors know whether staff members are on-line elsewhere in SL. This method conveys a stronger sense of ongoing activities; and visitors become aware that staff members are indeed on-line (thus avoiding feelings of doubt on whether the organization is indeed committed to its SL presence). One such system is used by Anshe Chung Studios at the Dreamland Central Hub (Fig. 5). This location ([4]) supports this company’s virtual real estate business. People wishing to purchase or rent virtual land in their properties, or discuss related issues, can travel to this location, where a series of balls represent staff members: black balls means that specific staff members is off-line, whereas balls looking like Earth represent an on-line staff member. The balls also allow visitors to send a message to its associated staff member.
Figure 5. Information desk at the Dreamland Central Hub
An issue with this approach is that it doesn’t provide a single point of contact for new visitors. It is adequate for this real estate company, since each visitor will likely require a very personalized and possibly long contact, and all staff members provide the same service, but possibly not for most organizations. Another issue is that it requires that at least some staff members be on-line in SL. While that is likely for Anshe Chung studios, since SL is a core area of activity, it is not the case for most organizations; and certainly not the case if one wishes to create similar information desks in several different virtual worlds.
VIII. SYSTEM OVERVIEW
The aim of the Information Desk System presented herewith is to allow organizations to offer direct staff interaction to visitors of their virtual space in SL. To achieve
this, we developed technology that integrates SL with IM networks and enables two-way SMS communication.
The overall idea is that visitors communicate with an avatar at the information desk, without being aware that it is in fact an automated avatar – a bot. The bot routes public chat and private messages to an actual staff member, chosen from a list of staffing priorities, based on scheduling criteria, such as who currently has an IM contact on-line, and how many conversations that person is already handling. If all staff members are unavailable through IM, then SMS messages to their cell-phones are used.
The two communication methods are thus IM and SMS. The SMS service is established by two GSM modems, one for receiving, the other for sending. IMs are exchanged between the messaging client software of the user’s choice and SL by means of two midware layers: the aforementioned SL bot, which relays chat and IMs from SL users to the system, and sends chat and IMs from the system to users; and an automated IM contact – an IM bot – that is present in the contact lists of staff members’ IM client software and provides similar functionality at the other end of the communications channel.
The diagram on Fig. 6 presents an overview of the system. The Management Server integrates the various technologies and hosts the website presented further ahead, as well as the programs controlling the GSM modem, the SL and IM bots, and the system logic. The full system has four parts: the registration and management website; the SL bot; the IM bot; and the modem communications software.
Figure 6. System model
To use the service, an information desk administrator registers with the website and creates a list of staff members for the information desk, entering their IM contact data and/or cell-phone numbers, and how many simultaneous conversations can be handled by each. This information will be stored in a database, used by the IM bot to send “friendship” requests to the IM accounts of the staff members specified. In the current
prototype, staff members can use this system with Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and any IM client software that uses the XMPP protocol, such as Google Talk, ICQ and Sapo Messenger.
After completing these steps, the administrator registers an SL avatar with the management server, to be used as the SL bot for the information desk. The administrator can then decide when the avatar should be logged in to SL.
When the SL bot logs into SL, it will record all chat from SL users nearby, as well as SL IM sent directly to it, and stores them in the management server database. This intermediate storage step between the SL bot and the IM bot is done in order to simplify the management of contention situations, and consequently, have simpler and lighter bot code. It also allows the server to re-route communications if necessary (for instance, if a staff member goes off-line during a conversation).
Since the IM bot, shown as a single IM contact at staffer’s computer (or the cell-phone number of modem, in SMS messages received by staffers), will be used as a gateway for several conversations, the Management Server creates conversation sessions when a visitor addresses the SL bot. Sessions are defined using parameters like the online state and priority of staff members, and can be of two different types, depending on the used communication method: IM session and SMS session.
The response messages from staff members, either through IM client software or SMS, are received by the IM bot or GSM modem, respectively, and follow the inverse route: they are stored in the Management Server database first, and then routed to intended SL visitor, through the adequate channel (public chat or private SL IM).
IX. TECHNOLOGY
A. Technological base
The Management Server used for the current prototype uses the Linux operating system with an Apache web server. The administration web pages were developed using Drupal, an open-source content management system. For information storage a MySQL database was used. Communication with the GSM modems was made using daemons programmed in Java, which store received messages in the database and query it for new messages to send to cell-phones.
B. Communication with SL and Public Messengers
The SL bot is logged in by means of an executable program developed in C# using the libopenmv library (vd. Section IV). To establish a legitimate communication channel with the largest possible number of IM networks and client software, we developed the IM bot for the XMPP protocol. Interoperability with non-XMPP IM networks is achieved using a XMPP gateway service that routes IM information between XMPP clients and other IM clients (currently, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM and ICQ). Google Talk, Sapo Messenger are native XMPP clients, as are many others.
The implementation of the IM bot for the XMPP protocol was done using the SMACK API developed by Jive Software
and available in open source under the Apache license. This library is written in Java and allows a high level of abstraction, enabling the communication with any XMPP server in a simplified way. Using it, one can create a complete XMPP client (instant messages and contact presence detection) – the IM bot.
X. OPERATION
As mentioned in Section VIII, the information desk administrator first registers with the Management Server Web site and creates a list of staff members (Fig. 7). The administrator must include himself/herself on this list, in order to be part of the information desk staffing.
Figure 7. Specifying staff members and their data
Afterwards, the administrator registers an SL avatar with the management server, to be used as the SL bot for the information desk, and requests that it logs into SL (Fig. 8).
Figure 8. Bot management page
In SL, users at the information desk will see the bot as if it were an actual staff member. They can chat near him or send him SL IM privately, as they would with any regular avatar. In Fig. 9, the bot is the avatar in the centre, and the two others are people requesting information. A public chat conversation is ongoing and it’s also visible a private SL IM window.
These conversations reach a staff member (selected by the Management Server, from priorities, on-line status, and limits on simultaneous conversations), as messages from a contact named sl_bot_messengers (Fig. 10) or SMS from the modem.
When avatars communicate via chat or IM, sessions are automatically created by the Management Server, and presented to the staff member identified as numbers. For instance, in Fig. 11, session 0 is the public chat, session 1 is a private SL IM conversation with the avatar named Takeda
Kanto, and session 2 is another private SL IM conversation, with the avatar named Chlecer Cuttita.
Figure 9. Information desk with bot and visitors
Figure 10. Side-by-side comparison: SL client and IM client
In the same figure, we can see that the staff member can use these numbers to define where his messages are sent (if no number is specified, it is assumed that one is still using the same session as for the previous message).
XI. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
Several tests were run both in conversations with single visitors and with various simultaneous visitors. We confirmed the correct operation of the prototype system with IM client software in general, but with a slight delay for Windows Live users.
There is still a need to conduct actual field tests with teams of staffers, to establish whether the current interface (particularly, the session-management mechanism) is adequate, as well as determine other elements that may be required in order to improve the SL bot’s behavior (for instance, facing the person it is speaking to). We have also experienced some issues with the current XMPP gateway (we are using the public SAPO gateway), and further work is needed at this level.
Regardless of the amount of work still to be done, we believe the current results enable us to conclude that the system
demonstrates the possibility of creating an information desk system for SL based on common IM clients and cell-phones.
Figure 11. Sample message exchange with sessions
We believe that such a platform is an important element for organizations of diverse sizes to have a virtual space in SL and other virtual worlds that is interactive and provides users with a sense of staff presence in that space.
Since only the SL bot is SL-specific, and many virtual worlds allow the programming of similar bots, we also believe that this system may allow organizations to easily convey this feeling of staff presence to several virtual spaces at the same time, even on several different virtual worlds.
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