Investigation of virtual worlds as a platform to support healthy aging for older people

Due to the aging of the population in recent years, it is becoming essential to find innovative activities to help the increasing older population maintain an active lifestyle and delay the need for institutionalized care. Virtual worlds, which have many potential values such as in providing social engagement, could be used to support older people in this aspect. Despite this, most research and design of virtual worlds today are based on young users and do not coincide well with the interests and requirements of older people. It is therefore necessary to investigate how virtual worlds can be designed to not only meet the needs of older users but also to provide opportunities for social engagement and support healthy aging. In the first stage of the research, a series of studies were carried out with older virtual world users to investigate their characteristics, interests and activities. This includes a qualitative interview study and an empirical study. Older users were able to develop interpersonal relationships in virtual worlds and were interested in activities which made useful contribution to society or those which allowed them to socialize with people who share similar interests. Next, two experiment studies were carried out, the first to investigate age related differences in virtual social interaction and the second to determine how different factors influence the social interaction experience. Factors such as navigation were found to influence social interaction and the study revealed limitations relating to the usefulness of the avatar. The findings from this thesis helps extend our theoretical understanding of the interactions and activities of older people in virtual worlds and how previously identified concepts regarding virtual social interaction relate to older users. In addition, the findings were also applied into guidelines to aid developers in creating better virtual worlds to facilitate social interaction and healthy aging.