Virtual world or “digital world” is an “avatar-driven social networking site” (“No Budget, No Boundaries: It’s the Real You”) that simulates real life. The virtual worlds can be used for many different purposes. One of them and most obvious is for gaming. 3-D avatar games like “World of Warcraft” substantially increase experience of the game.
Socializing is another reason for using virtual worlds. Users recreate their world, decorate their places, visit bars and other public spaces, meet like-minded people and even create their own language. Virtual worlds can also be very useful in any kind of professional training. Military training simulation can serve as an example. The use of virtual worlds has substantially grown within education as well. That does not only include university courses or language classes but many world-known museums and libraries, that have adopted virtual tours. In medicine virtual worlds help disabled people do things that they can’t do in the real life. According to Dave Sparrow, the “Naughty Auties” visitors can practice social interaction and find information about the condition. The graphical representations of real people create a "comfort zone" that can coax users out of their shells and get them communicating with others”. In Commerce, virtual worlds are used for advertising the places and getting feedback from customers.
Virtual worlds are also tapping into the work space. “Virtual community Second Life is seeking to tap into that market by creating a new tool that allows businesses to have virtual meetings on their own computer networks” (“Going to the virtual office in Second Life”).
Obviously virtual worlds can be used for various purposes and have a lot to offer. To summarize all of the above, they offer major opportunities for enriching learning in the vocational training and educational purposes and allow interaction in a realistic way.
On the other hand, there are of course some disadvantages. Virtual worlds are known to attract a higher numbers of predators: as an avatar you can do whatever you want since no one knows you, therefore you can be obscene and rude. In education, it’s hard to determine if students are taking their work seriously and hard to manage students behavior. Also for some unhappy and unsuccessful people a virtual world can replace a real world and they can lose a touch with reality.
On a good side, I think virtual worlds also foster creativity. You can create who you want to be, what you want to do and where you want to live. It forces you to brainstorm and visualize what you want to create. When used for education, students not only extract the information from the book and answer questions, they are forced to react in a particular scenario and create something new and original. The use of strong imagery, visuals and audio in a virtual world stimulate curiosity and promote new thinking.
So there is definitely a future for virtual worlds. I believe more and more companies and educational facilities will use it for meetings and interactions to cut cost. Some websites (http://www.thenanoage.com/virtual-reality.htm) claim that “Everything we experience in life can be reduced to electrical activity stimulating our brains as our sensory organs deliver information about the external world”. Therefore “Everything you see, hear, feel, taste and smell is an interpretation of what's outside, and” will be eventually “created entirely inside your head” using virtual worlds. We shall see…
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