The article by Associate Professor of Physics Tony Crider and Elon University iMedia alumnus Jessica Torrez-Riley ’12 appeared in the most recent volume of Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.
Their article “Using Google Trends Data to Gauge Interest in Virtual Worlds” appeared in the most recent volume of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. By comparing search data to available user data for Facebook and various virtual worlds, Crider and Torrez-Riley found the Google Trends data alone did not correlate with other measures of user interest. They also offered a preliminary analysis of Google Trends data for recently launched social virtual worlds that use virtual reality.