Application to tourism studies
We developed participatory simulation with OpenSimulator (OpenSimulatorulator) to examine the contrast bias on tourist satisfaction of their travel experience. The process by which a tourist assesses his/her satisfaction with any kind of tourism experience can be separated into two different levels, namely, expectation and experience (Bosque and Martín 2008). With the help of some other users and developers (Lindakellie) of OpenSimulator in providing contents to design virtual worlds under a creative common license, we developed two different sets of virtual tourism destinations to test the effects at the expectation and experience level.
Figure 1 shows the structure of the system. The system was set up in a stand-alone mode to ensure that the simulator and all services are operating in the same process in only one computer. The contents of VE can be stored as user-inventories and loaded into the simulation scene of the VE. The developer can utilize the “Build” function of the viewer to design and to modify the scene. The users can use the viewer to login to the system, control their avatars, and navigate in the VE.
These are two states of satisfaction during the trip (Oh et al. 2012). The expected satisfaction is usually generated during the decision-making process on destinations or attractions, while experienced satisfaction occurs during travel activities. The expectation level refers to the process where tourists are provided with different options of tourist attractions, and evaluate whether they will be satisfying or not. The experience level refers to the process where tourists evaluate whether tourist attractions were satisfying or not after actually visiting. This study assumes that the contrast bias (of the types of the tourist attraction and the perceived quality of the attraction) can be detected. An attraction varies because of the difference in the visiting sequence, nature of attractions, and expected or experienced satisfaction. The satisfaction may be influenced by the contrast effect of the types of tourist attractions (same or different). However, the contrast bias of the perceived quality of an attraction may result in different experienced satisfaction levels between attractions of high contrast or low contrast of quality pair at the satisfaction level.