Art Education Avatars in Action
Lilly Lu · SensePublishers eBooks · 2011
Emerging 3D Virtual World (VW) technology offers great opportunities for 21 st century art education. Such virtual worlds are visualized and built by their residents. In these 3D visual communities, multiple users at different locations can communicate, collaborate, and share with one another through a character representation –an avatar – in real time. Depending on its purposes, a VW could be a virtual environment for gaming, social networking, learning, business, commercials, recruiting, and entertaining, or the VW can also feature an integration of a combination of purposes. Among current 3D VWs, Second Life (SL) is the most popular and highly recommended as one of the best 3D virtual learning environments (VLEs) for teaching and learning (Chodos, Stroulia, & Naeimi, 2009; Herold, 2009) due to its hyper-real 3D visual images, unique immersive power, and intensive interaction (Lu, 2008), as well as its potential for collaborating, networking, and learning (Thompson & Garetty, 2009). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.