Heritage 3.0: Virtual Communities and 3D Worlds

[i]Organized by Maurizio Forte (School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California, Merced) and Lily Diaz (Media Lab, University of Helsinki)[/i] conference VSMM 2008, October, 20-26, Limassol, Cyprus Keywords and topics: virtual communities, virtual reality, multiuser domain, embodiment, virtual museums, learning, cyber space. The immense and incessant growth of the digital information metabolism of Internet has created unpredictable results in a very short time: millions of people are inter-connected and able to share and construct cybernetic contents, but what type of contents? Is this overload of information really able to create new forms of learning and cultural transmission? What kind of information is transmitted to the future? What expectations can we have from the new virtual ecosystems? What we know is that this digital eco-culture creates different relations and feedback; we are moving in the era of the 3D cyberspace where we assist to the embodiment of cross cultural and multidisciplinary communities. If in the past decade, the Internet was principally based on multimedia browsing and structured contents, the new generation of Web is self-organized and reticular, made by de-structured contents and by 3D self-made cyber-spaces. Can this continuously evolving universe of information really construct communication, knowledge and culture? Every complex phenomenon needs time to be monitored and studies, so it is difficult to have an answer today. We could define the multiuser environments of cyberspace as “mirror communities”, because every user/avatar/models-maker makes his/her knowledge throughout the feedback of other users/avatars, so in some way his/her activity is reflected in/from other activities. Moreover the user can see him/herself from any spatial perspective, so he/she is embodied in the system; this embodiment constitutes the new frontier of the informational and communicational process. Every information is surrounded from reticules of additional information, like a universe able to contain infinite sequences of other worlds. How can we define this embodiment? In the ecological thinking the learning process depends on the capacity to produce difference between organisms and ecosystems (Bateson, 1979). Therefore, is the embodiment able to produce difference? There is a fundamental difference between traditional virtual communities and embodied communities: the first ones use mainly 2D interfaces and chatting, the second ones use 3D dynamic behaviours and interactions. Additionally, embodied communities use a principle of enaction for perceiving and constructing the information. It seems evident that embodiment depends on the level of the engagement inside the cyberspace: so, in theory, the embodied communities should learn and transmit more knowledge and in a shorter time than the traditional “chatting” communities. Unfortunately to transmit knowledge does not mean to transmit cultural information; we have a very limited understanding of how the virtual spaces created by different software and environments differ in the impact on user interactions and cultural learning. This phenomenon has developed a specific terminology: cyberspace, cyber communities, cyber culture, cyber universe, metaverse, cyber anthropology, cyber sociology, usability, user experience, and lastly, cyber archaeology. The need to create new ontologies to reflect the new state of existence can be explained from the growth of the embodied communities and from the birth of distributed forms of digital and social popularization such as the cyber games. The embodied information and the creation of cyber spaces for the archaeological and cultural consumption and communication can represent a totally innovative gateway to the simulation and reconstruction of the past. Visit the official site: http://www.vsmm2008.org/