Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds take social networking sites to a new level. They can have a business or social purpose. For example Second Life, a virtual world, are used by businesses like IBM to hold meetings. According to IBM’s CIO in Europe, Second Life was used for 72 hours by 350 of its technical leaders (from the article “Going to the virtual office in Second Life”). He there were a variety of environments they can choose to meet for business like auditoriums and social gatherings such as a sculpture park. Just like social networking sites, they allow the diffusion of ideas to flow faster and easily without having to be one physical place. Virtual worlds also allow people to do something they can’t in the real world. For example, people with disabilities can have avatars (i.e. the virtual world representation of a person) who can walk. It gives them a chance to have that experience even though it’s in a virtual world. The bad part about virtual worlds is that it takes away from face to face interaction with people. Yes, they are a good way to meet people but they are addicting. People can just spend hours online instead of actually interacting with people. Moreover, they can get less productive if they spend most of their time there. One way virtual worlds foster creativity, is in marketing tools used for businesses (from the article “Going to the virtual office in Second Life”). People are trying to incorporate new business ideas in them. I think one day virtual worlds are going to enable us to buy things in shops. They would have virtual versions of malls with the shops set up exactly as they would in the real mall; the best part would be, we would be able to buy actual things there and pay for it. Of course, it’ll be shipped to us but it’ll make the shopping experience totally different!