“One of the advantages of Second Life is that you can manipulate the sense of scale and perspective,” says IBM’s Hamilton. “You can crawl around a big oil rig or fly around a network diagram.”
Paul Steinberg, project manager at Intel Software Solutions Group, finds these modeling capabilities useful for various skills training programs. “We can miniaturize large systems such as our digital health solutions with remote access,” he says, “or blow up a computer chip.”
Flying your avatar inside a molecule at the science library in Second Life, for instance, gives you a novel view of the placement of carbon atoms in three-dimensional space. Another Second Life museum, Exploratorium, has built a scale model of the earthmoon system. Even astronomers have found that walking their avatars from Earth to the moon gives them a more immediate understanding of the sizes and distances involved
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