Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Have you ever wished you could visit Mars, go swim with dolphins or take a dive into the ocean, be at every sporting event, or even sing onstage with your favorite artist. With virtual reality, you might be able to do all these things and many more without even leaving your home. Virtual reality means a simulating bits of our world or an imaginary world, by using high-performance computers and sensory equipment, like headsets and gloves to take us into the realms of an imaginary scene, and make us feel live in the moment of that immersive environment.

Apart from games and entertainment, virtual reality has long been used for training airline pilots and surgeons and for helping scientists to figure out complex problems such as the structure of protein molecules. According to the article, “Avatar II: The Hospital” by Stephanie Simon, virtual reality is being implemented in hospitals to help guide nurses and personnel’s in training.. She states “participants can build their own virtual clinics and stage just about any training drill they can imagine. ER nurses log into the virtual world where each assumes control of an avatar- a cartoon rendering of a nurse wearing crisp blue scrubs. The nurse can walk up and down stairs and through doorways using keyboard or mouse controls.” This goes to show that virtual reality has gone beyond entertainment. It can be used to virtually help teach Nurses a typical day of work using this simulation program designed to mirror that of the hospital they work at.

While most believe that virtual reality is the way of our future, there are many who strongly oppose its integration into society. With that said there are many pros and cons to the virtual reality world. Some advantages of virtual reality are, provides a chance to experience things that are impossible in real life as if you were actually there, enhances gaming experiences, virtual prototypes, can be used to create training programs, and can make tourism a lot more fun with a virtual tour, etc. Some of the disadvantages are many people may become addicted to living in these virtual worlds, and as a result forget or neglect their responsibilities in real life, the device can cause people to get motion sickness, can be very costly and many can’t afford, etc.

In my opinion one of the major pros of the virtual reality, is its implementation in classrooms. Because, Provides Outstanding Visualizations That Aren’t Possible In The Traditional Classroom, creates interest and increases student engagement. According to the article “The Advantages and Disadvantages of the virtual classroom and the Role of the teacher” by G. Posey, T. Burgess, M. Eason, Y. Jones, it states, “students view the use of the virtual classroom as an ease of accessibility. It is much easier with the information posted on the Web because it is available 24 hours a day. Distance learning courses can be done anywhere and at any time. Students can view this information without having to contact the instructor.” This goes to show that with virtual learning, students will feel more freedom in their work and will actually engage more since they can learn visually. However, one major downside to this as stated in the article is “One of the most persistent problems has been the factor of time. Adapting non-online course to online courses can be arduous or challenging. The lack of face-to-face interactions with other peers and the instructor can be a disadvantage for the students and professors.” As you can see even though there is a huge development to this system of learning, it do have some small negatives, that I think can easily be fixed.

In my opinion I think that the virtual world would continue to expand and grow tremendously and would eventually be more commonly implemented in society. I think it will continue to be a big success in the entertainment and video games vector, because people are more likely to enjoy experiencing that virtual realm. To me, virtual worlds foster creativity, by making it accessible for people to put them self in this immersive and computerized environment that it just give them the experience that they thought they would never have, which opens up their mind and creativity.