Disputation Mikhail Fominykh - Department of Computer and ...

Background
In this thesis, a virtual city is defined as an environment representing a real or
fictional city and supporting a range of different activities for the purposes of
education, cultural development, entertainment, and socializing for local
communities and virtual tourists. Other possible roles of a virtual city include
attracting potential tourists and visitors and providing them with information
about the city, and the local educational institutions.
The most known virtual cities (both collaborative and single-user environments)
are made for geographical navigation, such as in Google Earth 1 , heritage
preservation, such as Rome Reborn 2 and Forbidden City 3 , others for gaming and
socializing, for example Cybertown 4 and Citypixel 5 . There are examples of virtual
cities for advertisement and shopping, such as Near 6 . Some other virtual cities are
multifunctional, such as GeoSim Cities 7 .
It is also popular to build virtual cities within large virtual worlds that represent
the physical world in a very direct and realistic way and known as ‘mirror worlds’
(de Freitas, 2008b; Hudson-Smith, Milton, Dearden, & Batty, 2009).
In general, while educational 3D CVEs focus on collaboration among learners that
are geographically distributed, the metaphor of ‘virtual city’ brings local issues
back into the distributed virtual environment, recognizing the critical role of place
and local communities in learning (Rheingold, 2003). Therefore, virtual cities have
potential to support what Thackara calls new geographies of learning,
“configurations of space, place, and network that respect the social and
collaborative nature of learning” (Thackara, 2005).
2.4 Learning communities in 3D collaborative virtual
environments
This section provides a background on the use of 3D CVEs for the support of
learning communities. It is known that constructing meaningful artefacts and
collaborative work on meaningful projects is closely related to learning
communities (Meyers, Lamarche, & Eisenberg, 2010). Community support is called
one of the main reasons for conducting technology-enhanced constructionist
learning activities (Bruckman, 1998).
The section provides information on the theoretical framework Communities of
Interest, which is used in this research work for describing learning communities.
1 http://www.google.com/earth/index.html
2 http://www.romereborn.virginia.edu
3 http://www.virtualforbiddencity.org
4 http://www.cybertown.com
5 http://www.citypixel.com
6 http://www.nearglobal.com
7 http://www.geosim.co.il
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