Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds


Virtual worlds are a powerful tool as they can be used to imitate reality in a safe way, for corporate purposes such as training employees or carrying out conferences. But also, they can be an outlet for creativity and this is seen mostly in video games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. A recently popular form of virtual worlds is virtual reality.

A potential pro and con of virtual worlds are that it can affect the user's mental health. As seen in the reading, Virtual world may impact real-world behaviour, in this article, there is a positive example where a user sees their skinny avatar and it motivates them to lose weight in real life. However, there are a lot of cases where people become addicted to their alternate reality and the "second life" they live where they start to neglect real-life responsibilities in favor of their life in the virtual world.

Virtual worlds foster creativity as many people treat them as an escape from reality where they can create things that can't normally exist in the real world. The rise of virtual reality is also going to boost creativity as people are coming up with new ways to carry out everyday activities. One example can be found in the article, The Virtual World Moves Into the Classroom, where they detailed more classrooms are incorporating VR in their curriculum in the form of field trips. Instead of bringing kids to the natural history example, they can actually enter a virtual world where they can see the pre-historic world with dinosaurs roaming the planet. There are a bunch of creative new teaching solutions with VR, that will make kids more excited to learn.

 I think the future of virtual worlds will be heavily invested in both virtual and augmented reality. I think the barrier of entry is still too high and hope that the price of these VR headsets will decline as the technology evolves. I'm highly interested in how the next generation consoles, Sony's PS5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X will implement VR. Apple has just recently released a new iPad Pro with LiDAR technology which expands the use of AR or augmented reality, this is a really exciting time.



Sources:

http://www.health24.com/Mental-Health/News/Virtual-world-may-impact-real-world-behaviour-20140210

The virtual world moves into the classroom Posted by Joe Earle | Sep 14, 2018 https://www.reporternewspapers.net/2018/09/14/the-virtual-world-moves-into-the-classroom/

Comments

  1. Delwende SalambereApril 21, 2020 at 8:26 PM

    I like your article.I completely agree with you. The future depends on technology.

    ReplyDelete

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