Friday, October 13, 2006

Virtual Worlds, Real Training

As I've blogged about before, I've been doing a lot of thinking about games and virtual worlds both from an entertainment, patient services and training perspective. I had a silly idea to create a sample of how we could train Light the Night staff to design and build memorial gardens which honor patients and their families. The idea here, just to be clear isn't to create virtual memorial gardens, but to take basic building blocks (flowers, layouts, walls) and use a virtual world to train staff on how to build and design gardens that can be implemented in the real-world. Second Life just so happens to be a convenient platform right now but is actually incidental to this application.

I used Second Life to create a sample garden area and made this little video. Aside from the clunky user interface of SL and a host of other reasons why this wouldn't work - I think this could work!!!



I could be cynical and name all the reasons (IT, bandwidth, security, training, productivity etc..) of why a virtual world training sim wouldn't work - but I'd rather be optimistic about new training models like this finally emerging and becoming extremely useful (and fun).

Excuse the messy camera work at the end - and me calling it a rock garden, that was just wrong.

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