On the Article: First Responders meet Second Life
February 11, 2009
Just received this great article in the Medhill Reports – Chicago, from Michelle Miakos (UCSA International) forwarded to her by one of the Linden family:
First responders meet Second Life: Public health enters the virtual world
by Liz Hoffman and Chris Kelly
Feb 04, 2009
This is a great article about how to creatively use virtual worlds, in this case the 3D, immersive virtual world called Second Life owned by Linden Labs, for real life training and scenario simulations. This is a growing field; a few companies are developing simulations and offering full services to support training and meet this demand. UCSA International is one of them, offering similar services to other government agencies for training, collaboration and meeting purposes.
Companies, governmental agencies and educational facilities would do well to determine how they might effectively use virtual world simulations to save money, increase training retention, and, above all, create simulated scenarios that will enable employees or trainees to practice real time responses otherwise extremely difficult to pull of without an exorbitant budget and logistics. The possibilities of this are endless for any type of business. The field is new, so I look forward to working on many upcoming design projects that involve 3D design of effective serious learning environments, curriculum design and other aspects of this work.
Kudos to the team that developed this. I was very happy to see this fascinating article. Follow this link to read the full article.
