Monitoring Social Expectations in Second Life ( Extended

Online virtual worlds such as Second Life provide a rich medium for unstructured human interaction in a shared simulated 3D environment. However, many human interactions take place in a structured social context where participants are subject to expectations governing their behaviour, and current virtual worlds do not provide any support for this type of interaction. There is therefore an opportunity to adapt the tools developed in the multi-agent systems community for structured social interactions between software agents (inspired by human society) and adapt these for use with the computer-mediated human communication provided by virtual worlds. This paper describes the integration of one such tool with Second Life. A model checker for monitoring social expectations defined in temporal logic has been integrated with Second Life, allowing users to be notified when their expectations of others have been fulfilled or violated.