Designing Adaptive Virtual Worlds

1 Introduction

The boundary between our physical environment and the digital world is becoming increasingly blurred as we move more and more of our personal communication, health records, bank details, professional interactions, educational materials and records, and entertainment online. On one extreme, we have a physical world void of any digital content, an increasingly small part of the developed world, but still present. On the other extreme we have digital personas that exist only in virtual worlds such as Second Life¹. These two extremes hardly characterize the complexity of the boundary between the two, but they allow us to think about what may be common in the extremes.

The boundary can be described as a sense of immersion or a focus ...