Entry nº 28

Coment: Virtual worlds

I am particularly interested in the issue of Virtual Worlds due to the fact that in our country this kind of advanced technology is not able yet. This virtual worlds are three-dimensional reproductions of almost any thing in the real world, virtually all created by users. There you can find businesses, Universities, art institutions, musical groups, casinos and even the sexual industry. Through Internet these cyberworlds produce huge amounts of money.
The most popular virtual worlds on Internet are Second Life, its owner is a private enterprice called Linden Lab and Entropia Universe that was created by the Swedish Government.
My main interest is the uses or applications of this technology in Education and Work. In what refers to Education, I found information about many Universities of foreing powerful countries such as The United States and The United Kingdom that have bought their own “land”(as they call their space in these cyberworlds) in Second life. Harvard Law School has built a court room in Second Life for students to practise their advocacy skills.
To take part in this parallel universe you have to create a three-dimentional character that is called avatar, you can choose your appearance, age, gender and colour. In this way you can create the person you have always dreamed of being no matter if you are a student, a teacher or a tutor. Then your character has to be trained to walk, fly (to another area of the cyberworld) and even get dressed.
Virtual worlds have a pedagogycal use in education; they are an important tool of teaching, learning and research. For students these virtual classrooms are less intimidating than the real life because they can avoid the problems of the face-to-face interaction, mainly in what has to do with physical appearance. Because of that these classes have been specially design for disabled students. Teachers can bring distance learner together and they have a clear vision of who is contributing and paying attention and who is not, and if needed they can take the class to other areas of this virtual world.
As the users have the possibility to build multiple things, these parallel words can have important applications for genetic coding, mathematics, chemistry and architecture.
In what respect to work, these virtual worlds have the capacity to generate thousends of jobs through Internet. Such is the case of a new virtual universe that China is launching with almost seven millon users and its most important aim is to create new jobs. In this way virtual worlds are boosting the trend of home-working. Consequently this trend has a good effect in our enviroment due to the decrease of pollution generated by travelling. That is whay corporations find it a good place to hold meetings. At these respect Second Life has three important applications.First it has a system for micropayments using its own currency (Linden dollars) that can be changed for real money, second its residents can keep their intellectual property rights to what they create and third its an open source because it allows anyone qualified to create their own applications (games, education or business projects).
But there are some difficulties in the use of this new technology. The degree of control is limited in education because it belongs to a commercial provider and the institutions can not restrict the areas that the students have access. The possible confusing attitudes of the students towards their theachers while sharing the same virtual environment. An important obstacle is that unless you have a top-range computer virtual worlds are not practical so that poor countries than can not affor the adquisition of these equipments are in disadvantage with the powerful countries. And finally in the future, the distintiction between real and virtual may become very indistinct. Having this in mind, I can`t help thinking in the description of the future given in the book Fahrenheit 451 because this virtual worlds are getting interesting for more and more people that are spending more time there than in the real world. And I fear this situation could end in a society totally controlled by the providers of this service, making of the users zombies of the technology whose only way of living will be in front of a screen, being completely unable to maintain a face-to-face communication.