Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual words can be used in different ways. In the article "I've been in that Club, just not in real life" a person enters a three-dimensional replica of a club that is just a few blocks away from his house. He has spent the last three months visiting an online social-networking replica of his neighborhood, interacting with many other users that rather enter these spaces from the comforts of their own home. Virtual worlds can be used for various reasons such as the one above. People who cannot physically make it to certain places because of a disability get to experience these places from a computer screen. Virtual worlds can also be used as virtual classrooms. The advantages of this are that it offers flexible access and new ways of communication and assessing for students and teachers. The good thing about virtual worlds is that they give some people the ability to do things that they cannot do in the real world. The downfall to virtual worlds is that they can become obsessive for some people where they think that the virtual world is the actual real world and loose their sense of reality.