Virtual world

A virtual world is a computer-simulated environment where multiple users can create a personal avatar for themselves and simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, use its goods and objects, participate in its activities and communicate with others. Its most common purpose is entertainment in various forms, but there are also virtual worlds (or metaverses) for educational, communication or business purposes.

An "active virtual world" requires its installation on a server that provides the online service persistently, active and available 24 hours a day on and every day. Although, today (2018) there is the possibility of establishing virtual worlds in a portable way (on a portable hard drive or a pendrive or USB type memory). Whenever 'worlds' are attempted, they are set up for users (usually called Residents) to live and interact, usually in real time. The characters, or avatars, are represented by 2D or 3D graphics depending on the virtual world and this is supported by a game engine.

Virtual worlds appeared for professional learning purposes (flight simulators), teaching (MOODLE) or in the medical environment, but it is currently being taken by electronic entertainment companies, who see a new era in this technology for video games. Although they are not limited to video games, many of these virtual worlds are known as massive online video games or MMOs (Massive Multiplayer Online).
Since in these virtual worlds it is possible to assign scenarios in which virtual reality environments are represented, there is the possibility of creating environments with a function for role-playing, the representation of mirror worlds (see Metaverse) or distance education, granting qualities that go beyond playful activity or play.

Virtual worlds are valuable platforms for communities of practice.

History

Human beings, practically throughout their entire existence, have been interested in illusory or parallel worlds. In the XX century, cameraman Morton Heilig created the Sensorama in 1962, a machine that allowed, according to its author, to live "theatrical experiences". These experiences were designed to stimulate all of the audience's senses, thereby creating one of the first experiences in virtual reality.

However, following the current definition of the term, linked to computing, the first virtual reality device was the so-called Sword of Damocles, an augmented reality helmet created by Ivan Sutherland in 1968.

The first 3D online environment, which introduced the concept of the "online player", was the game Maze War, developed in 1973 and 1974. It was played over the ARPANET, the precursor to the internet financed by and managed by the United States Department of Defense. It was a first-person shooter that would lay the foundations of a genre that, years later, would be popularized by Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.

The first virtual worlds were chat communities, with very simple graphical environments. These chats evolved into environments known as MUDs in 1978 with MUD1. A MUD is a non-graphical computer program, accessible by Telnet, into which users can plug and explore. In a MUD, each user takes control of a computerized character, incarnation, character, etc. You can walk around, chat with other characters, explore and create chat rooms, descriptions and items. These environments would evolve, over time, into MMORPGs.

The first proper virtual world was the graphical environment known as Habitat, developed in 1985 by LucasArts. It was a graphic chat designed in 2D, where the players chose their own avatars and could perform different actions between them. Later, in 1990, the technology was sold to Fujitsu, who relaunched it in 1995, with a more attractive and updated graphical environment, such as WorldsAway. However, the first 3D first-person game to be played online was Maze War or Maze in 1974, in which avatars chased other players through a maze.

Cinema and literature have also been an important influence on the evolution of virtual worlds, largely determined by novels by authors such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson, among others, belonging to the sub-genre of “ Cyberpunk”. The latter with his famous novel Snow Crash (1992), which proposes the creation of virtual alternate worlds or universes called “metaverses” where a large part of the interactions of his characters.

In 1996, Finland, together with the Helsinki Telephone Company, developed the first online 3D virtual recreation of the complete map of the city of Helsinki. The Virtual Helsinki project was later renamed Helsinki Arena 2000 and combined renderings of all the city's architectural and urban complexes.

In 1999, the first virtual project whose purpose was purely educational, Whyville.net, was launched. It is an educational environment based, fundamentally, on learning through play. It was also one of the first environments to have a virtual economy.

Origin and name

According to the 3D Virtual Spaces Education project, Virtual Worlds are a combination of virtual reality within a chat environment, also known as Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs).

The term Virtual World was used by the creators of the game Ultima Online, in fact Virtual Worlds were born and initially developed as game environments, and from a technical point of view, they are the product of the combination of a graphic environment 3D that incorporates chat-based social interaction systems developed in the World of Multi-User Domains (MUDs).

Examples of Virtual Worlds in Spanish

Within Virtual Worlds, we can distinguish large groups such as those related to Education, the Health sector and 'Games.& #39; Some examples of this last group are the following:

• SecondLife] [1]
• Habbo
• Sanalika
• Smeet
• ilDom [2][3]
• Club Penguin

There are many others, not to mention lists of virtual worlds in English, you can check the list of mundosvirtuales.net

Virtual worlds and the Health Sector

The education sector and professional training courses are the most promising application areas in the sector of educational technologies of virtual worlds. Today, more than 150 universities and educational institutions around the world, including developing countries, have a presence in Second Life and other virtual worlds. The factors that have motivated high rates of adoption of this technology in universities and other educational centers are: face-to-face and group interaction between students and educators around the world, access to intellectual resources and knowledge, oral communication and being able to examine complex and abstract models using 3D visualization or projections of visual information.

The design and development of professional training courses for doctors, nurses, medical students, nurses, hospital managers and patients with certain ailments, take their interactivity as a great resource from virtual worlds, their characteristic of environments free of risk of suffering some type of accident or contamination in a practice, decrease in training costs compared to the real world, and given their nature, they facilitate simulations through role-playing games. Some examples of these uses are: the construction of social-emotional environments for virtual teams in the health sector, use of virtual environments to monitor health care in the elderly population, virtual environments can augment traditional care in the management of Diabetes, immersion in a virtual environment for training in medical equipment.

In traditional medical training students learn and build certain medical skills using "standardized patients" , this work allows them to develop clinical reasoning skills, clinical analysis, diagnosis, writing clinical histories and managing the doctor-patient relationship; but standardized patients, which are real people trained to represent specific diseases, are often not available to all students because their number is limited and their relative costs are high. The solution is provided by virtual worlds with "virtual patients" which can be modified and duplicated without significant costs, are available to all students and allow to achieve most of the objectives that they are achieved with "standardized patients". An example of this type of training is presented by River City in which students travel to the past and study a specific epidemic, since it It is a simulation, they establish a hypothesis about the reasons that can influence this disease. this initiative can be expanded in

Virtual Goods and Virtual Economy

It is important to highlight the concept of "virtual currency": in these worlds you can acquire objects or graphic goods that improve the game experience, called Virtual Goods in English. Many business models of these virtual worlds allow real money to be converted into in-game credits to purchase said items or skills.

The virtual goods market is estimated in 2010 at 80 million dollars for Spain, 1020 million dollars across Europe, 1600 million dollars in the US and more in Asia.

The legal framework for the use and conversion of money from these virtual platforms is still not fully defined, so in the past there were controversial cases ending in court. See the case of the Habbo controversies. Most of the virtual worlds provide the basic service for free to their residents, with minimum and sufficient privileges to participate within them and be part of the community. As part of the business, having greater privileges to acquire or rent spaces (land) or acquire objects requires a real economic investment (money) on the part of the users. For the same reason, the greater the privileges obtained, the greater the cost or investment by the residents.

As an option for those interested in establishing virtual worlds without economic investment, there is the possibility of establishing one or several of these on computers or personal computers (or on a server) with software packages that are distributed free of charge, as is the case of Opensim. With this resource, virtual worlds have been developed in which residents can interact between world and world, integrating a set of these called Grid.

Virtual worlds in education

With the advent of new technologies, changes were generated in education, one of these changes was the creation of digital tools for teaching.

The use of virtual worlds in education has important benefits in the academic development of a student. These can show knowledge visually and recreate social situations through which values and skills can be taught to children. Another of its advantages is the space, the student has interactions with many users simultaneously, which generates social skills for daily life.

Altamirano (2008) talks about the importance of virtual worlds since, "they make up by themselves a multi-sensory learning environment and provide the user with the sensation of presence that is not found in education through traditional distance"

However, there are few educational institutes that apply digital tools and/or spaces in the daily teaching of students, so it is up to teachers to incorporate the digital space in their classes. Fortunately, there are many open virtual worlds that can be used free of charge to support classes. They are currently being used as an educational tool that encourages distance learning. Cooper (2003) talks about the importance of differentiating this type of educational proposal from the rest of online learning in which the idea of an "educational community" is further promoted.

Today there are many Virtual Worlds created for educational purposes. We can find both Virtual Campuses (Universities, Institutes...), and MMORPG-type games, among others.

Virtual worlds in companies

Companies like IBM use Second Life solely to provide a virtual meeting place for their employees to interact. Toyota and Reebook instead use Second Life to collect information about their customers' preferences (Goel and Prokopec, 2008 in Goel et al. 2009)

Limitations of Virtual Worlds

Sakalli and Chung (2015) mention the need to take into account the limitations of a technological tool, thus they include some limitations due to which this type of resource is not so widespread. Firstly, they mention the difficulty of transmitting non-verbal messages, which can affect the meaning of the interaction. They also comment on the difficulty faced by people who are not used to this type of system (some virtual immigrants).

And finally, the negative consequences of creating an unrealistic world are highlighted.

Goel, L. et al. (2009) mention that they provide minimal support for asynchronous communication that is beneficial for facilitating explicit knowledge sharing, as highlighted by the success of blogs and wikis (Cayzer, 2004; Grudin, 2006).

Other authors also highlight the need for a good management of emotions (frustration, dispersion...) as well as technological problems (weight of programs, command of the interface by the user, technical issues such as firewalls, etc..) as limiting factors of virtual worlds.