Tom Maloney  |  Interests  |  Scholarship  

Interests

• Virtual Reality as a realistic training medium
  Preliminary research indicates that Second Life (SL) is a viable VR program. SL is a 3-D virtual world where users can create an avatar to represent their persona inside the game or training activity. SL users can create buildings, landscapes, or anything users can imagine. The SL creator developed a social networking system that connected people via the Internet. Users are required to download a thin platform onto a computer; however, the vast majority of the program is run by SL. There is no cost to the end user to create their basic avatar. The focus of this research is to determine if commercially produced social networking systems, such as Second Life (SL), can be an environment adapted to provide realistic and productive training and teaching of various subjects and topics throughout the nation.