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Howcouldwecreateavirtualworldwithtechnology.docxHow could we create a virtual world with technology?
Answered by Meredith Bower and HowStuffWorks
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Some people just don't "get" the virtual worlds of Second Life and similar massive online environments. These people aren't necessarily luddites; they simply prefer to keep their heads in the real world. And even to tech-savvy Internet warriors, the idea of a completely virtual world may seem incomprehensible. What would it look like? How would it feel? And what effect would it have on the real world? When you look at the advances constantly being made in technology, it becomes apparent that we are closer to building convincing and useful virtual worlds than many of us realize.
Maybe you've played one of the games in SimCity series, using a computer to design and simulate life in a virtual population center. If you have a talent for games like this, you may also have a talent that can be applied to the real world. The annual Future City Competition, hosted as part of National Engineers' Week, provides middle-schoolers the opportunity to design complex simulations of a proposed city of tomorrow, first using the virtual environment provided by SimCity 4software to build their city, then actually translating their virtual designs into physical models in three dimensions. The stated goal of the competition is to pique the interest of middle school students in engineering, technology, science and math. It's conceivable that the ideas the kids have today will eventually be part of life in the future. In the 2011 challenge, contestants were tasked with designing a product or system to improve the quality of life for sick, injured or disabled people. The winning team created a city focused on helping people with type 2 diabetes [source: Future City ].
In the same way that virtual modeling could help us design better cities, virtual augmentation could help make existing cities more user-friendly, so to speak. The idea of a virtual city is not too far-fetched. The University of Southern California offers the community a geospatial social networking Web portal -- in other words, real-time data overlaid on Google-style maps. Dubbed iCampus, the technology is a hybrid of the real and virtual worlds, enabling users to see and avoid traffic problems, determine the exact location of the campus-wide tram, find out what pedestrian routes to avoid due to recent crime and locate a place along their route to get a bite to eat. Developers believe it won't be long before this technology will be applied to entire cities [source: USC ].
