Identity plays a key role in virtual communities. In communication, which is the primary activity, knowing the identity of those with whom you communicate is essential for understanding and evaluating an interaction. Yet in the disembodied world of the virtual community, identity is also ambiguous. Many of the basic cues about personality and social role we are accustomed to in the physical wor...

We study the Beaudry and Portier (2006)-hypothesis of delayed-technology diffusion and news-driven business cycles. For German data on TFP and stock prices we find qualitatively similar empirical evidence. Quantitatively, however, an impulse response analysis suggests that a substantial part of the total TFP response is immediate rather than delayed. We relate this to disembodied technological ...

Virtual reality can broaden the types of interaction between students and computer tutors. As in conventional simulation-based training, the computer can watch students practice tasks, responding to questions and ooering advice. However, immersive virtual environments also allow the computer tutor to physically inhabit the virtual world with the student. Unlike previous, disembodied computer tu...

We study whether a virtual agent that delivers humor through verbal behavior can affect an individual's proxemic behavior towards the agent. Participants interacted with a virtual agent through natural language and, in a separate task, performed an embodied interpersonal interaction task in a virtual environment. The study used minimum distance as the dependent measure. Humor generated by the v...

We propose a novel way of using tilt as a style of interaction for palmtop computing, as well as a theoretical base for doing so. Beyond superficial and disembodied metaphors, the force of gravity has been chosen to guide navigation within a space larger than the palmtop’s screen. Gravity allows the user to experience ‘an interface with weight’; an understanding put forward as embodied which di...

This essay discusses the meaning of embodied spirituality—based on the integration of all human attributes, including the body and sexuality—and contrasts it with the disembodied spirituality—based on dissociation and/or sublimation—prevailing in human religious history. It then describes what it means to approach the body as a living partner with which to co-create one’s spiritual life, and ou...

Questions of 'who we are' are often intimately related to questions of 'where we are', an idea captured in the environmental psychological concept of place-identity. The value of this concept is that it attends to the located nature of subjectivity, challenging the disembodied notions of identity preferred by social psychologists. The topic of place identity would thus seem to be a productive p...

We describe initial work on building a virtual gallery, within Second Life, which can automatically tailor itself to an individual visitor, responding to their abilities, interests, preferences or history of interaction. The description of an object in the virtual world can be personalised to suit the beginner or the expert, varying how it is said—via the choice of language (such as English or ...

This paper discusses the determinants of product innovation in young innovative companies (YICs) by looking at in-house and external R&D and at the acquisition of external technology in embodied and disembodied components. These inputoutput relationships are tested on a sample of innovative Italian firms. A sampleselection approach is applied. Results show that in-house R&D is linked to the pro...