Virtual and Immersive Environments

A virtual environment is a setting that is not real but includes real traits with which people can identify. The contents may reflect pure imagination or may model the real world. The environment becomes immersive when users are no longer observers but participants in the setting that is depicted, in some cases becoming actors in a larger drama. This entry describes the nature of some of the most popular virtual environments, such as Second Life, and explores their significance for geography.

Virtual settings or environments have long been a part of the human experience, as exemplified by prehistoric cave paintings, the utopic “Garden of Eden” and “New Jerusalem,” Homer's Odyssey, and the Greek and Roman “Golden Age” myths. Today, people lose themselves in the elaborate landscapes of movies, plays, and novels. And of course, there is the ever-present video game—the ultimate “out-of-body” experience for devotees. Geographers create their own virtual settings in the forms of maps, geographic information systems, and three-dimensional (3D) flythroughs.

Perhaps the most elaborate virtual environment is the virtual world, which emphasizes participant immersion and community engagement. While that books, movies, and plays invite the reader or viewer to step into imagined worlds, as do 3D renderings of landscapes, these types of immersion lack the “authenticity” of the virtual worlds that began to appear in the mid 1990s. Thanks to improving computer technologies (particularly in [Page 3020]gaming), and to the development of social networking and 3D Internet technologies, 21st-century virtual worlds are fully contained immersive environments in which participants not only imagine their involvement but are actually involved. Modern virtual worlds contain communities of people who interact in settings that are networked, persistent, synchronous, immersive, and, above all, 3D. Participants enter these worlds as extensions of, or alternatives to, the real worlds that they inhabit and the real lives that they lead.

The new virtual worlds are here to stay. The Gartner research group predicted in 2007 that by the end of 2011, 80% of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 companies) will have some sort of 3D presence. Other observers have commented that virtual worlds will soon be pervasive interfaces for the Internet, using multiple entry and exit points, and that “metaverse browsers” will connect participants to multiple worlds. According to Wade Roush, the user may encounter an “interverse” connecting various “intraverses.” In brief, virtual worlds offer the potential of redefining the communications landscape very much like the World Wide Web did in the mid 1990s.