Contributions to Conferences

Applying Gaming Technology to the Living Lab Concept

Abstract

Living Labs are an emerging concept in which firms, public authorities and
citizens work together to create, prototype, validate and test new services, businesses, markets and technologies in real-life contexts, such as cities, city
regions, rural areas and collaborative networks between public and private
players. Such real-life and everyday contexts both stimulate and challenge
research and development as public authorities and citizens not only participate
in, but also contribute to the innovation process.

Whereas the Living Labs approach traditionally focuses real-life, physical
environments, the emergence and widespread acceptance of massively multiuser
virtual interactive environments such as MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer
Online Games) and virtual reality based communities such as Second Life offer
a platform for its application in virtual worlds. Already, enterprises are
harnessing Second Life for the evaluation of market acceptance of future
physical products by their introduction as virtual products into the virtual reality
environment.

Several major factors can be identified as favourable when considering the
utilisation of these virtual worlds and communities for the Living Labs approach. For one, the creation of virtual product and services prototypes as well as their deployment is far less expensive than extensive physical prototypical
implementations and test runs within traditional Living Lab. Furthermore, the
cooperative, co-creative and playful-but-serious nature of the activities around
which such online communities revolve can be conceived to be embracing of
new and innovative ideas. However, the speed of communication in these
communities as well as their growth could prove to be a risk. This paper examines the opportunities involved in transferring the Living Labs approach to virtual and gaming environments.