Then we also use, is where the study participants, once they've chosen an avatar and named that avatar, all of that information was stored there and matched with their email address. So that was kind of the way. Again, this was apre-test/post-test study, so we needed a way to follow that through. We had to restrict access to this because second life is a virtual open world. Our island,we restricted it to--the only way you could get to our island was that once you receive that token,then that token allowed you to enter our island,so that our data was not skewed in any way. This type of research,this type of platform does require high-speed Internet,and Web hosting.
I've shared with you that my sequel and PHP was used as a Web hosting supporting browsers. There are many, from Firefox to MS Internet Explorer. The later the software the better this seems to run. Budget. So in order to capture this and to maintain it we rented an island, a new island eight. We rented this island for--this study was 12 months in length. It costs us 1,100 dollars to rent this island,which is about 1000U. S. dollars. The programmer I hired and the researchers I hired as OPS, hourly wage. The programmers used her instructional design along with my health care background to create the games,the platforms. I knew what I wanted. She knew how to make that happen in design. Each and everything that you saw in this platform took time. It wasn't like you could take wallpaper and kind of just put it up. Everything that instructional designer actually built. So she set up the domain,did the configurations,build and exhibited it,and then she hosted it the entire time that we were running this study. So as part of the--at the end again you see another token to exit it.
At that point they would email the survey,and the survey results with this pilot study provided me with useful information in the sense that the majority of the participants had no experience with second life,but again about more than 40 percent of them said that they found this type of platform for research very useful. Quickly, the next steps, i would like to now move from a pilot study to a feasibility study. This study was A-synchronized. I would like to use this amphitheater here to build a--if you can imagine it,it can happen. So I imagine making this more of a synchronized session,much like we're doing today,a set date, a set topic and invite the avatars,these person as to join the topic and dialogue real time with questions and answers and an information session. So that's the next step for second life and how I plan to use this as a research study.
Nothing happens alone. Nothing happens on our island by itself. This is the research group that I-- this is the research team that I had the pleasure of working with. is the programmer with being there search assistant and my research team there. None of this would have been possible without the funding of the rebel,which scholars program. So with that said,I will turn it over to, and we'll open it up for questions. Thank you.
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