Virtual Reality

A virtual reality is a computer-simulated environment, real or imagined. It exists along with "actual" reality. Virtual reality is the world you enter when you play massively multi-player role playing games (MMRPGs) such as Second life, the Sims, and World of War Craft in which players can take on new identities and interact in new ways with other players who have assumed new identities. Players can have other lives, experiment with new behaviors, do everything they would do in "actual" reality.

Virtual reality has been around for a while. Airplane pilots are trained using simulators which create virtual realities. They've been around on TV, in movies, and in books too. The Holodeck in the old Star Trek Next Generation series was a virtual reality. In the film Space Cowboys the astronaut characters played by Donald Sutherland, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and James Garner train in a flight simulator. The Matrix films were all about virtual realities. William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, published in the 1980s, brings the reader into a virtual reality.

Virtual Realities are important to learn about for a couple of reasons. First, hundreds of millions of people in the world will be into virtual reality. It creates its own mindset and there is evidence that playing video games rewires the brain so that you think differently. If you're trying to relate to them you'll need to know how they think.

Secondly, you test market things in virtual worlds in ways you can't in the real world. You can run experiments you can't in the actual world and test stuff that you could not test in the physical world. And there are lots of characters in the virtual world who will take your tests if you know how to do it. There are companies whose business it is to run these tests.

So get with it. At least learn about it. Look in Sandy Carter, The New Language of Marketing 2.0 (2009). Or go to Richard Bartle's massively detailed Designing Virtual Worlds (2004), which will tell you everything about it.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.