In today?s modern society with high-speed connections covering the globe people are more than ever finding themselves gazing into the cold lights of the computer screen. On the other side a strange and exciting world yet to be explored awaits. Many are those who spend hour after hour running over green hills swimming in vast blue oceans in the lands of Azeroth, the playfield in the MMORPG game World of Warcraft. In media we often read and hear alarming reports on players stuck in this virtual world, ceasing to play a part in the real world.

In my degree project, I explore the importance of distance and how our perception of distance is affected by our experiences.During my investigatory work I studied the relation between distance and experiences. Among other things I concluded that distance can refer to several different kinds of distances (for example spatial, temporal or social distances) and that experiences are what you?ve learnt of these distances. The importance of distance can be illustrated by highlighting the effects of the distance, i.e. experiences.My degree project resulted in a pair of interactive binoculars which are used for looking at an virtual world of illustrations in 360°; a world of illustrations where distance and the importance of distance is shown..

The work place is becoming more flexible and an increasing number of employees report to a leader in another location or country. The borders between different countries, work places and cultures are diminished to a greater extent than before. Working from a distance means new opportunities in terms of competence development, flexibility in working hours, tasks and resources, a larger platform for various career opportunities and an expanded network. The purpose with this study is to examine how leaders can create a successful virtual team and motivate remotely. The qualitative study is carried out through interviews with leaders and employees within Nielsen Nordic.

All companies face risk in their daily business. Internationalised companies tend to experience higher risk due to for example unfamiliar business environment than companies that act only on the national market. Estonia became independent as late as in 1991 and is therefore a new interesting market for many companies in neighbouring countries like Sweden. Risks that are most apparent for an internationalised company are political risk, currency risk, capital and interest rate risk, business risk and credit risk. Our intention of this study was to find out how Swedish companies acting on the Estonian market faced the different risks when entering the Estonian market and how they value the risks today.

I en värld där kraven på flexibilitet, säkerhet och hårdvaruoptimering är nyckelfaktorer när det kommer till att välja IT-miljöer för företag blir virtuella skrivbord mer och mer poulära. Med dessa miljöer finns det också problem när det kommer till användarupplevelsen om nätverket ifråga inte kan uppfylla de krav som ett sådant system ställer. I detta arbete undersöks implikationerna vissa nätverksvariabler kan ha för en Virtual Desktop-infrastruktur, VDI. För att belysa dessa problem har två tester utförts på en VDI miljö. Det första testet gick ut på att mäta latensen då skrivbordsmiljön renderades för klienten från virtualiseringsservern vid olika nätverksdiamterar.

Since the beginning of the internet the criminal world has used the medium as a platform for operation.This dark web is a domain where illegal sites are flourishing due to the possibilities offered by newtechnology. Net-based criminal activity is a challenge for society as it uses hard proof technologicalsafety measures to avoid the law. Silk Road is the most prominent example, an online illicitmarketplace where drugs and illegal substances are being traded based on conventional e-commerceconcepts. This paper argues for trust as an important factor for the survival of illicit online trade andapplies existing theories on e-commerce and virtual communities. To identify patterns of trust andcommon trust-based issues among Silk Road users, a netnographic study was conducted on the site?sdiscussion forum.

For many years, the construction industry in Sweden has not developed much of an integral approach for design across disciplines. The sector?s impact on society, economics and environment is huge. To make the interactions within the construction industry more efficient, a relatively new concept called BIM (Building Information Modeling) has been introduced. The idea with BIM is that the different actors of the construction industry will work through intelligent CAD software, with common file formats and more cooperation between different actors during the various steps of the building and construction process.The technical consultancy company WSP Sweden is working actively to implement BIM within the frame of its activities.

After Sweden became a member of the European Union, EU, the debate regarding the Swedish participation in the EU?s currency co-operation, the European Monetary Union, EMU, has been intense. One of the biggest issues has been how our national economic politics will work within such a monetary union. What instrument will remain for the national economic politics within the EMU are highly uncertain. The question whether we will be able to affect our own economy or not has long been the essence in the Swedish debate.

The intention of this essay has been to investigate how the new digital technology has affected the tourism industry and marketing, as well as how travel agents and tour operators adapt to this. We also aimed to get a broader view of how the future might look like when it comes to marketing and virtual service landscapes. We decided to base our research according to these following four questions:? What affect travel agents? way of adoption to the technical development?? What purposes do the travel agents have for building up their virtual service landscape?? How much does the travel agents emphasize on digital marketing?? What can travel agents do to better adapt to the technological development in the future?We have chosen to use a qualitative research for this essay. The reason for choosing a qualitative research was to gain a wider understanding that would represent a big part of the changes of technology development.

In this work, a method was developed and evaluated for calculating the life of welds under the influence of fatigue loads from a vibration environment. Typically, a shaker table is used for testing a component against vibration loads. The shaker table creates a vibration environment that is defined in the frequency domain by a power spectrum.Similarly, a virtual vibration table can be used to calculate the same type of load environment, which can then be used to calculate the expected lifetime. The benefit of this method is that it can be used in design, as well as in simulation of tests before physical verification tests are carried out.Today there are methods for calculating fatigue life of non-welded base material, but since many components contain welded joints, there is a need to apply this method to those types as well. To achieve this, the thesis combines two different areas, which together provide a method for fatigue assessment of welds using a virtual shaker table.The methodology is carried out by modeling the component, and its welded joints, in a finite element program.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine the virtual reference service Ask the Library [Bibblan svarar] from a postmodern perspective. Ask the Library is a Swedish online reference service that is run by the country?s public libraries. The postmodern theories of Jean-François Lyotard are used to study how information is managed and transmitted within the service.

The aim of this paper is to find an algorithm to establish and maintain a virtual enclosure around a mobile unit. The area may take any form and should be scalable up to and including national borders. The enclosure is managed on the mobile unit. The target system is Android. Smartphones, tablets and more recently, cameras is examples of mobile units.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the levels of social distance used by the librarians and users in the virtual reference interview. With a conversational analysis and applied politeness theory 49 chat transcripts where analysed in order to answer the question of how the interlocutors positioned themselves regarding the social distance between them. By identifying what communicative strategies where used the following results were found. Generally the social distance between librarians and users is low in the Swedish virtual reference interview. Even though both parties used informal and casual language the results indicate that the librarians face wants were valued slightly higher than the users which were illustrated by a some what higher social distance in the stages of the conversations when the librarians face was under most threat.

This Master thesis discusses the development of a virtual human soft tissue object for use in exercise applications of various medical procedures.The soft tissue object to be developed shall look like, feel like and behave as living human tissue. It shall give the user a realistic feeling of weight, softness and roughness, and shall behave in a correct way for exercise purposes. The soft tissue model is to be used in a three dimensional stereo graphic environment with haptic feedback. A prototype for practicing the procedure of inserting a catheter is built. The prototype is used to evaluate the potential of the virtual environment for medical exercise applications, and to assess the realism and usability of the soft tissue object.

Bakgrund: Riksbanken har haft sedelmonopol sedan 1897, vilket har inneburit att de sedan dess har haft ensamrätt att ge ut pengar. Den teknologiska utvecklingen och den ökade användningen av internet har lett till att virtuella samfund har utvecklats och i vissa fall har dessa samhällen skapat sin egen valuta. Bitcoin är världens första helt decentraliserade valuta och baserades i början av sin existens på teknisk nyfikenhet för en handfull hobbyister. Under de senaste åren har efterfrågan på bitcoins ökat vilket i sin tur har lett till att kursen stigit explosivartat.Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att kartlägga och analysera de transaktionskostnader som kan uppstå när Bitcoin används som betalningsmedel, samt jämföra dessa kostnader med de transaktionskostnader som är förenade med användandet av traditionella betalningsmedel.Genomförande: Studien har genomförts genom en blandning av ett kvalitativt och ett kvantitativt tillvägagångssätt samt genom en bearbetning av transaktionskostnadsteorin inom ramen för ny institutionell teori. Empirin består av tre delar där studien inleds med en litteraturstudie för att läsaren ska få en inblick i vad Bitcoin är och hur valutan fungerar.