Opinion Elicitation in Second Life

The paper describes a novel method for opinion elicitation, which is based on the popular 3D online world of “Second Life”. Here people, as avatars, are put into a somewhat realistic context related to the topic for which opinions are sought. We hypothesize that this kind of concrete, interactive context supports the evocation of opinions better than non-context methods, e.g. only showing related images. To confirm our hypothesis, we conducted a small pilot study, which compares the influence of static and interactive context methods on the opinions expressed by subjects. The opinion elicitation scenario in Second Life is supported by the automatic retrieval of opinions from the web. The results of a study indicate that subjects show more reasoned opinions in the interactive condition. A demo illustrating the content of this paper is available.