Virtual Worlds in Instructional Simulation
A virtual world is an interactive 3-D environment where users are immersed in the environment. Users can manipulate the environment and interact with other users. Depending on the degree of immersion, users can begin playing a game, interact with other users, attend seminars, or complete course work for an online class. Online discussion groups and social networks such as Myspace and Facebook are already being used to supplement interaction within coursework (Baker 2009).
Sparkle is poised to become the first virtual world for the iPhone. What's more, it's being developed completely from scratch, exclusively as an MMO for the iPhone/iPod Touch. This will bring more mobility to the learner. They will no longer need to be at a desktop.
Second Life is a virtual world where users create avatars. An avatar is a virtual representation of the user to other users. These avatars then interact with any other user within the Second Life world. Avatars can purchase virtual land, own buildings, and travel, interact, conduct business, and even attend lectures by professors. Second Life is running 24 hours a day and is tied into the Internet, so there are always other avatars to interact with.
MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies are video game based virtual environments. These game engines hold the potential for instructional simulation. Unlike Second Life, these are pre-designed games with their own set of objectives that need to be completed through a progression.
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Famous quotes containing the words virtual, worlds and/or simulation:
“Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune—what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)
“Truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with ‘the world’; for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous. Rather—speaking loosely and without trying to answer either Pilate’s question or Tarski’s—a version is to be taken to be true when it offends no unyielding beliefs and none of its own precepts.”
—Nelson Goodman (b. 1906)
“Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey’s fits and starts, rehearses life’s own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)