Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are computer based community designed by individuals to help interact with others and create a community. In a virtual world, individuals would use an avatar which is a representation of themselves to interact with the various users on the net. Virtual reality can be used in the study of science, playing games, and education purposes.

The pros of virtual worlds is that it can be used in various ways. According to "'Naughty Auties' battle autism with virtual interaction" by Nicole Saidi, shows how it can be implemented to treat disorders. The virtual worlds allows for avatars or real people to create a comfort zone. The comfort zones allow users to feel relaxed when meeting new strangers on the net than going out in real life to see them. The virtual world help people with autism because it sets up situations they may come across in their everyday lives. Other various ways virtual worlds are used for socializing, education, political expression, and military training.

Besides the pros of virtual worlds, there are cons. Some cons are the hardware required, training, and people escaping the real world. According to "Virtual world may impact real-world behavior" says how you represent yourself in a virtual world may affect how you behave towards others in the real world. It states that in role-play virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers. This shows that virtual reality possess a negative effect on the user depending how they play that they wouldn't normally show in the real world until they feel that the real world is similar to a virtual world.

Virtual worlds foster creativity by the users creating a virtual world that displays the reality mixed with unrealistic aspects that cannot happen in the real world. Different virtual worlds can call for different things such as the collaboration of a group, building worlds and tweaking it to what they feel is right. I feel that virtual reality will continue to grow in the future and change everyday lives. There are also developers trying to create VRMMO such as what happened in the anime Sword Art Online.