Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds is something that we look at today and imagine what it really can do to benefit the world through education as well as by enjoyment.  Virtual worlds have both pros and cons but in my opinion have a lot more pros towards it.  For example, it can help the education in this world like crazy as we can try and virtually bring students back in times where there was dinosaurs as well as through specific times in history so that they can get a better knowledge of what actually happened rather than by just reading textbooks.  In a virtual world you are getting a first hand experience to the history of the world itself.  Possibly even the future depending on how your creativity and imagination want to work.  In the article "After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get A Reboot?" by Diane Mehta, she conducts an interview with Jacki Morie, a Senior Scientist and Project Director for the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies.  During this interview Morie explains how she had conducted a training facility for the U.S. Army and put a U.S. Army Vet to try it out and the veteran stated that it is so real that if other vets were in here they would need a therapist by their side.  Virtual worlds can also be used to go places by actually never visiting them in person.  For example in the article "I've Been in That Club, Just Not In Real Life" by David Itzkoff of the New York Times, he talks about being in a music club getting ready to listen to a band.  A couple of minutes into the show it started to get extremely packed and started to smell like stale beer so he decided to leave.  He walked home and went on his computer and attended this show virtually without having to deal with the packed capacity and dirty smells of stale beer but in his own comfortable home.  The past couple of months he has been traveling the streets of Manhattan virtually.  

With these pros also come some cons, such as the biggest of all being the dangers of the virtual world.  A prime example of this is criminals such as pedophiles.  These criminals trick people with their identity because you cannot know who a person is through a virtual world.  Some people do lie to people and mistaken their identities to trick others such as children into doing things that they are not supposed to be doing.  These criminals have very creative minds as the virtual worlds foster their creativity.  Once again a prime example are the criminals who are using mistaken identities to sucker in children.  By getting these children to do things that they don't want to do, you would have to use your creative mind from the virtual world to influence them and make them comfortable in partaking these actions.  

I think the future of the virtual world is bright for many reasons but the main focus as I stated earlier being education.  I feel that with the virtual world learners of the world today can forget about the textbooks and actually experience everything they are learning through the virtual world.  A first hand experience will definitely sink in to a child's brain of learning more than reading from a textbook.  It will also teach them how to prepare for these situations if they were to happen in life today.  A prime example being the United States Army Training that was mentioned from the article titled "After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get A Reboot?" that I had mentioned earlier preparing the youth of the United States military for combat before they have reached the field.