Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

After reading some of the assigned readings, I learned that virtual worlds can be used for many different purposes such as educational, entertainment, professional meetings for employees of corporations and business firms, creating communities for folks who may be in similar situations or circumstances, a social platform for meeting other people, and even visiting and traveling to other areas of the world virtually. I read the Forbes interview article, called “After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get A Reboot”, written by Diane Mehta. In the interview article, Mehta was interviewing Jacki Morie; I learned that virtual worlds can be used to provide healing for soldiers as well as training and preparing them. Morie had stated that “What If I built Iraqi village and we used it for healing instead of for training? Or I put in artificial intelligence (AI) characters as villagers?  What if we use this for healing to repair some done by people with these conflicts?” (par.14). I found this to be extremely interesting; to use virtual reality for healing purposes is extremely creative.  Another article that I found interesting was called “Avatar II: The Hospital”, written by Stephanie Simon; it discussed how virtual reality worlds can be utilized to help prepare nurses for what may occur in the real world. I thought that this could be incredibly helpful as well as cost saving, all in one. Some of the pros associated with virtual reality is that it provides a chance for training and developing certain occupations such as military, nurses, etc., people can recover from phobias, people with disabilities may meet in the virtual world, perhaps even creating a support community, developing hobbies such as design and fashion, virtual reality helps aid in creating friendships and bonds. Some of the cons are the notion of escaping the real world and spending more time in the virtual one, creating a virtual world may be costly, and a lot of virtual reality is still new so we don’t know the full capabilities of it. I think virtual worlds help create or spark creativity because it is not the real world, people have more room to make mistakes and they will not be so costly! Just the idea that this is virtual can make minds bring out great thoughts as there are no barriers in the virtual world that could be present in the real world. Creativity can be created through the self as one develops their avatar, such as new ways to dress, haircuts, etc.  The creativity that is created through virtual worlds can be reflected into the real world as well. The future of virtual worlds will perhaps be much more expansive; I feel like it will be more heard of rather than hidden.  It can be perhaps used by more (rather than few) multi-national companies, where employees may need to meet from many different locations. Perhaps meeting virtually will l be less of a unique and novel idea and more of a usual norm or policy. Maybe even construction companies could use virtual worlds for their business purposes or fashion designers, so that they could get a better idea of what to design and who would like it. The future can bring about use of virtual worlds through different arenas such as schools, hospitals, fire departments, and police departments.