As first euphoria and commercial initiatives calm down, the scientific interest in media and information theory is raising (e.g., for educational applications and for the problem of multiple identities ).įrom a cultural or psychological perspective, virtual 3D worlds allow to study human behaviour in a decoupled, reversible way-like mirroring the reality, including other people’s intimate thoughts, by interacting through a the 3D interface. The most recent and most famous of these worlds is Second Life, but several text- or graphic-based environments in the web existed before. For several years, virtual 3D worlds gained significant public attention.

There is a strong mutual penetration of the digital and physical world, leading to phenomena like virtual reality (computers mirroring the real world) or augmented reality (real-world objects enriched with digital information).

Here, the importance of computer science needs to be emphasized along with the growing immersion of digital systems in our daily life: dealing with computers can be seen as a new cultural technique besides reading, writing, and calculating. Interactivity is closely related to aspects of networking and interdisciplinary development, bringing together researchers from engineering, computer science, media art and design, and social sciences. The primary advantages of this interconnection are a spatial extension of face-to-face and online learning scenarios and a closer relationship between virtual learners and the real world. A flexible and bidirectional link between the reality and the virtual world enables synchronous and seamless interaction between users and devices across both worlds. In particular, this paper shows that Second Life can be more than just another learning platform. Unfortunately, most of the environments and processes implemented up to now do not exceed a virtual modelling of real-world scenarios. In particular, the number of educational providers that see a potential for E-Learning in such new platforms increases. Virtual worlds became an appealing and fascinating component of today's internet.

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