BBC NEWS | Health | Virtual world ‘tackles paranoia’
Interesting article. A recent conference I attended demonstrated a 3D, avatar based world (there.com)- we even had ourselves scanned into avatars by BT!
The whole avatar idea generated a lot of excitement amongst the people I was with – they thought the environment would support virtual coaching, amongst others. I always think coaching a form of therapy – and I wondered whether these environments could be used to solve really antiosocial behaviour. Most of the discussion was around “look at who and what you can see” I thought it would be incredibly powerful to take your realistic, virtual representation and see it act out innapropriate behaviours etc. I think that would joly a lot of people intop reassing their behaviour. How many times to people tell eachother “You should see yourself…” Hey – you can!
Imagine a canned racism scenario, but instead of delegates watching some abstracted video, they see themselves – how powerful would that be?