This research is going to demonstrate a virtual museum via second life, the visitors can have the chance to more profoundly experience the masterpieces. By extending 2D paintings to 3D world, users can be not only more adaptively perceive the expression of painting but also intuitively interact with the 2D famous painting in 3D world. Also this kind of art appreciation can play a profound contr...

in recent years, virtual communities have been significantly popular and almost all of them are targeted for business profitability. in our study, the profitability of these communities for businesses has been analyzed from a commercial perspective. the study considers virtual community as a business model which can have a great impact on consumer purchase decision process. with respect to refe...

In order to improve teacher preparation courses offered online, a study of the use of Second Life virtual world for peer-teaching activities was conducted. The research period was over one year and the sampling group consisted of 25 Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) students. The methods practiced during the study follow the suggestions and implications given in previous research in ...

The ultimate goal of industrialized, developed economies is to increase economic growth and to have a highly-skilled, flexible and responsive workforce in order to remain competitive in an increasingly global economic context. Therefore, there is increasing focus on exploring the various options for optimizing worker training. Apprenticeships, traineeships and internships are some examples of t...

Virtual environments define a new interface for networked multimedia applications. The sense of "presence" in the virtual environment is an important requirement for collaborative activities involving multiple remote users working with social interactions. Using virtual actors within the shared environment is a supporting tool for presence. In this paper, we present a shared virtual life networ...

Current research on virtual organisations focuses mainly on their formation and operation phases, devoting only little attention to the dissolution phase. These passages typically suggest that dissolution should occur when the organisation has fulfilled all its objectives or when it is no longer needed. This last definition is quite vague and hard to define, as the need for an organisation is n...

In the past few years, virtual worlds – such as Second Life, World of Warcraft and RuneScape – have demonstrated the potential to be a promising online business model. Millions of paying users around the world now participate in virtual worlds and trade virtual items with each other. However, little empirical research has been conducted into players’ purchase behaviour in virtual worlds. To add...

Virtual worlds are mostly inaccessible to blind users, due to their exclusively graphical interfaces. We developed the Perspective viewer for Second Life and OpenSim virtual worlds, which enables blind users to explore and navigate Second Life virtual worlds with relative ease. The Perspective viewer allows different tools to be modularly added to the viewer, to enable comparison amongst differ...

Strategies for detecting terrorists carrying radioactive material can be evaluated in virtual environments more easily than they can be in the real world. Real scenarios expose personnel to radiation and concomitant dangers. The execution of multiple real-world scenarios – such as catching terrorists in factories, houses and open spaces – is expensive. This paper describes virtual environments ...

Most researchers associate a culture with the knowledge that is somehow related to the environment inhabited by the knowledge carriers and results in producing highly distinct objects characteristic for a particular culture. In our work we propose a model of virtual culture that preserves the environment, objects and knowledge associated with a certain culture in a 3D Virtual World. We highligh...