Blog: Modeling Reality With Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds can be used in some ways:

• In office: clerks share documents and have distance conference
• In military: for training soldiers for the dangerous situations
• In education: hold large group of students in the same class, and hold discussion with large group of students; Especially for students in medical school, visual worlds can be used for showing surgery processes. 
• In healthcare: can be used for diagnosis like MRI scans.
• In Entertainment: people wear the particular goggles to see 3D objects.

Pros:

• They provides convenient and efficency . Documents can be circulated among different departments in a company.Employees can hold conference not only in offices, but also at home with their bosses or partner. The article called Going to The Virtual Office in Second Life states that companies are seeking ways to bring employees together by conference. In addition, it mentions that IBM sells Sametime 3D which allows businesses o share ideas and collaborations. Those are ways to save time and provide convenience. 
• They save money. Documents do not need to be printed out. Also, in the article call Going to The Virtual Office in Second Life says that " Dropbox" allows online storage and sharing. 

Cons:

• They lack face-to face interaction. The article called Virtual Classroom say that students may want to have a immediate feedback from their instructors, which they do not get online. Without professors' detailed explanation,  students may not fully understand some keys points of the subjects. 
• Sometimes, technology will cause troubles. For example, you can't upload documents without internet. Your software in your computers do not support certain format of documents. When you try to fix those problems, it may waste your plenty of time to do it.

The ways that virtual worlds foster creativity:

Through cooperation and idea sharing from different parts, people use virtual worlds to work and study can find the appropriate ideas to create their works. People can try their new ideas through virtual worlds where they can correct and revise their new ideas until their new ideas can be carried out in reality.

Future developemet:

No matter what advantages or disadvantages of virtual worlds have, they are going to be prosperous. I think there is no doubt that virtual worlds will be used a lot in jobs, study and military training. Computer science experts will try to overcome shortcomings and develop new tools for virtual worlds, such as security of virtual worlds and efficiency.