Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are becoming a growing interest in mass media that is being used by incredible amounts of people.  Virtual worlds are used for business, entertainment, educational and recreational purposes.  With virtual worlds it can foster creativity especially in games where design is limitless and you can create a character or "map" that reflects your imagination.  There are many pros to the virtual world experience including its use in educational purposes.  In the article "Avatar II: The Hospital," a virtual world program is used to teach med students how to interact under pressure in a hospital by creating a virtual hospital that is bombarded by patients and need medical attention.  This article explains how using this program can help students learn how to react under pressure and get a sort of hands on experience by using the program.  A con to the virtual world can be seen in article "Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life."  In the article it states that the limitations of the virtual world make it hard to share national and organizational cultures.  This can make it hard to communicate between one another as colleagues and see the point of view of the other person without having face-to-face contact.  I can see the future of virtual world moving toward VR (Virtual Reality) headsets where a virtual world will really start to feel real like you are immersed in the very world you chooses to experience.  Research and design is currently going into this making a headset a very real thing for our future.