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:
“Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
“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)