A New Virtual Campus
Caltech is among the very best universities in the world, famous for being the home of Richard Feynman and other science legends. (And perhaps even more famously, for being the setting for Big Bang.) Now it’s helping drive a rebirth in educational uses for virtual worlds with Virtech:
Virtech is an interactive, social, and private space inside Second Life, designed to furnish the Caltech community with an alternative to in-person interaction. Through the use of avatars, participants can visit a rich virtual space furnished to enable engaging experience as well as seamless social interaction. Virtech is a safe, pleasant space to socialize, create, collaborate, and learn. It is open only to the members of the Caltech community and their approved guests, and the members of other academic communities by a special arrangement. It is operated by the Virtual Reality Lab, which is a part of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery at Caltech.