Rising numbers of individuals are making use of the World-wide-web for the provision of all sorts of health services, from prescribing, via consulting to setting up automated self-treatment programs. But what about utilizing it for education and therapy? After all, in theory, the ultimate kind of cognitive behavioral therapy should be “virtual reality therapy.” By basically wearing your wrap-around sound and vision multimedia headset you can be quickly transported to a cliff edge, soar in a plane thousands of feet above the ground or be surrounded by a gathering of thousands of spiders – based on your phobia. And the ultimate type of on the web education need to be totally interactive, case based and student driven, all of which I now use in my teaching in Second Life.
The phrase “virtual reality” was coined by Jaron Lanier in 1989 to describe personal computer simulations of physical environments. Due to the fact the mid-1990s, the video game market and 3D graphics card suppliers have driven forward the state of individual computer graphics, advancing it far beyond the requires of most company users. These systems range in capability from straightforward displays of 3D objects to whole virtual cities. Virtual reality systems are now becoming routinely implemented on personal computers for a assortment of activities. One of the most well known virtual reality applications is Second Life, made by Linden Lab, Inc. Second Life is a common-objective virtual world accessible by means of any Internet-connected personal computer system. In order to interact in Second Life, customers build “avatars”, or animated characters, to represent themselves. Folks use these avatars to maneuver by way of numerous “worlds”, complete with buildings, geographical characteristics, and other avatars. Although the technique borrows heavily from video game technology, it is not a game – there are no points, no levels, no missions, and nothing to win. It is basically a platform by which folks can develop virtual communities, model geological, meteorological, or behavioral phenomena, or rehearse events. I have been operating in Second Life for several years now.
Users of Second Life contain a variety of education organizations, from Harvard Law School to the American Cancer Society. There are presently locations of the virtual world that supply such disparate services as teaching heart sounds and auscultation approach, supplying social assistance for folks with Asperger’s Syndrome, and modeling the effects of tsunami on coastal towns. The technique has over ten million account holders from all over the world, most of them with cost-free fundamental accounts. About 800,000 of those customers are active, with over 80,000 of them connected to the technique at any time. Virtual reality applications such as Second Life are increasingly being employed for educational purposes in a variety of fields, like health-related coaching and disaster preparedness. Linden Lab currently operates the Second Life Education Wiki which functions as a source of information and facts for educators and trainers in a selection of fields who want to use Second Life for distance understanding or substantial-scale training purposes. Medicine interview course of government agencies, which includes the Division of Homeland Security, the Centers for Illness Manage, the National Institutes of Well being, and the National Science Foundation, have begun using Second Life to hold meetings, conduct instruction sessions, and explore strategies to make access to data a lot more readily offered about the world. A recent comprehensive survey intended to collect info on the activities, attitudes, and interests of educators active in Second Life carried out by New Media Consortium reported that the majority made use of it for educational purposes such as teaching and taking classes as well as for faculty training and development.
I have been working with Second Life as a teaching and learning environment for a number of years now. With colleagues I have developed a “virtual hallucinations” atmosphere, which demonstrates the lived encounter of psychosis and enables participants who travel via the atmosphere to experience both visual and auditory hallucinations visions and voices. We utilized this environment to teach this expertise to our healthcare and psychology students. With the California Department of Overall health and other colleagues I have created a virtual bioterrorism crisis clinic to train health workers, and a lot more lately, as element of our Well being Informatics Certificate Program, with University of California Davis Extension, we have taught informatics students in a virtual conference center on our personal private island Davis Island. Students discover the atmosphere simple to learn to navigate, and inside a week of our informatics students being introduced to the environment they were able to travel and tour about Second Life with the rest of us with ease.
Second Life and similar multi-user environments present huge possibilities in the health-related educational world, exactly where such applications are now named “serious games” rather than social or exciting software. Students of the future will adapt to them really very easily, and it is clear that applications such as Second Life have a fantastic educational future before them. I look forward to continuing to teach classes of health-related and graduate students “inworld”.
