What you find is what you believe

As a virtual world teaming with avatars, Second Life shows promise as an experimental platform for social psychology. The first research paper that exploited this got attention at the end of last year – the authors claimed to have found evidence that some details of how we interact in the real world transfer to our avatar-avatar interactions. Now, there’s a great video out from NPR that brings these findings to life.

The video has been making blog rounds, but the study behind it is being taken as mantra. Yee and colleagues’ work is indeed groundbreaking – but exploratory, not conclusive.

Stranger than virtual

In Oman, TV channel hopping, we land on the Qatar channel. Camels are racing in one long straight course. Alongside them, on either side of the roped-off course, are 2-3 wide columns of cars, 4×4s. The camels are galloping, with an occassional one or two trotting – very fast. For a moment I’m confused. It looks like they have no riders. Then our eyes catch the strange-looking contraptions tied on the camels back. Believe it or not, the contraptions are little robots. The one function we see them perform is occassionally whipping the behind of the camel, as a camel jockey would. We’re transported into a futuristic world – I could imagine seeing this in Second Life, but instead these are the sands of Qatar, a hop skip and jump from our physical location in Muscat.

But the robots feel doubly strange, like something somewhat familiar, with a twist that throws one completely off. And then it sinks in. The robots are short and squat. In fact they look like children. The robots are in fact a replacement of the terrible practice of roping in children, sometimes forcibly, as camel jockeys.

Here’s a piece in the National Geographic about the shift in Qatari camel-racing practices. They also have a clean shot of the robot.