Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

            Virtual worlds have created a whole new way to perceive the world. Some people may look at it like a game but for some people it really is a second life. Not only can we use virtual worlds for personal reasons, it can be used in the business environments. We can create a whole new life for ourselves, being able to do so many things that in real life don't quiet seem that possible for us. Also we are able to recreate places and things from our past that may not exists or may not be the same as in Hotel Chelsea as mentioned in Saki Knafo's article In Room 100, It’s Sid and Nancy All Over Again. Businesses can use virtual worlds as a way to reduce expenses and bring together people from all over the world.

            With everything that's good, we always have something bad and it applies to virtual worlds as well. What we can see as a pro for virtual worlds is that it is an easy way to become social, meet new people and being able to engage with them, which for some people may not be so easy to do. People with disabilities can become a perfectly normal person in a virtual world if they wanted, being able to do thing that their disability would have otherwise prevented them from doing. For companies, it allows their employees to join in on a conference with the comfort of being at home, taking away the hectic traveling discomforts and on the whole reducing costs for them. The con to all of the this though, is that it removes the element of physical human contact and may not always give people the chance to get out all of there ideas if they didn't get the chance to before as mentioned by Surinder Kaha in Mark Tutton's article Going to the virtual office in Second Life.

            Virtual worlds foster creativity in a by allowing people to express themselves however they want. They are not tied down to one particular task or aspect in something. People can feel free to share there ideas and create some form of it in a virtual world. You do not need to worry about someone judging you or criticizing your creativity which will then lead to more people being comfortable in expressing their ideas. I think the future of virtual worlds is very bright and full of so many possibilities. We have only just begun make use of this type of new media, soon we will have hundreds of different functions for it.