 Online Learning Update Ray Schroeder, editor, COLRS - Online@Illinois SpringfieldOnline Learning Update - a blog published daily since 2001 by Ray Schroeder, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Springfield |
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Saturday, August 11, 2007
Second Life's virtual conference rooms might be more useful if they didn't resemble their real-world counterparts - Erica Naone, Technology Review
MIT researcher Drew Harry flies his avatar into a house in Linden Labs' online environment, Second Life. The avatar passes couches, a fireplace, and a dining-room table complete with red-velvet tablecloth and candles. "Second Life is relentlessly literal," Harry says, pointing out one familiar domestic object after another. Harry designs virtual spaces that don't look like the familiar world--his virtual meeting room looks more like a football field than like a conference room. He says his goal is to stop mimicking the physical world and start creating a new kind of space. "It's not clear to me yet that [virtual worlds] are actually useful," Harry says. They will be useful, in his view, if they can take advantage of not being physical.
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