Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: New advances in science and technology always come with enthusiasm-inspiring hopes and show-stopping fears.When are such hopes and fears warranted and when are they fictitious themselves?The aim of this article is to see if we can create standards, or protocols, to measure people's hopes and fears during online transactions and connect this to a decision support system that estimates the probability that the user's expectations are right.User and adaptive systems could take measures to deal with the situation, by going ahead if all is clear, taking away undue fear, or downplaying false hopes.We attempt to do so by theory development through the reconciliation of technology acceptance, hope formation literature, risk perception and problem solving.We present a framework that we call Your Virtual Future, in which we describe hope and fear formation during future-oriented behavior in virtual worlds.This framework acknowledges the users' experience and knowledge of real and virtual worlds as they are immersed in the contents as well as in the hardware.It accounts for the user's personal capacity to accept delayed gratification and to be able to build up realistic hope.It moreover explains how users select solution paths within the affordances of the virtual world.We formulate the requirements for standards on undue-fear prevention and justifiedhope promotion in virtual worlds -in relation to contents as well as equipment.We suggest that user protocols, the human side of standardization for expectations management, are needed and that technological standards are required to generate a generic interface or shell that serves as a layer to all virtual worlds to tap a user's state anxiety, to feedback regulating instructions, and to automatically self-adapt the system.
Authors: Marco Otte, Johan F. Hoorn
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1565349879