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[[Category:Everyday Life]]
Some of the more common VR environments include:
==Conference Rooms==
Simple environments used for telepresence
meetings. The most popular venues are luxurious
rooms or halls with culturally appropriate decor. Most of these
include at least one “window” onto an exotic landscape (mountains,
deep forest, undersea, space). No characters need to be
managed by the node; the visitors provide all their own interactivity.
Participants can “conjure up” elaborate audiovisual
presentations, transmitted from their own computers.

Businesses and social groups often use VR conference
rooms for meetings, while schools use them as lecture halls.
VR meetings have almost completely replaced face-to-face
contact for many situations – such meetings are extremely
inexpensive in comparison to the costs of globe-spanning travel
and physical meeting space.
==Shopping Malls==
These more complex environments allow
merchants to display their wares in virtual space. Customers
can examine goods at their leisure, placing orders for later
physical delivery. Customer service representatives can be
posted to answer questions and provide a human touch. Virtual
storefronts also give merchants a great deal of control over
the presentation of their goods (there are occasional scandals
about subliminal advertising or goods not being quite as attractive
in reality as they are in VR).
==Virtual Cruises==
A “virtual cruise” is a slang term for any
highly interactive VR experience which involves a small number
of participants over a few hours of time, and which has a
well-defined plot. In effect, a virtual cruise is the next step up
in interactivity from an [[InVid]]. The participants
are cast directly into roles within the scenario, and have more
direct control over the course of events. As the name suggests,
many virtual cruises are travelogues. Others include militarystyle
training scenarios, historical pageants, and the roleplaying
equivalent of short novels.

Virtual cruises require the involvement of AI synthespians, taking on the roles of extras, expository characters,
and other NPCs. Since virtual cruises are usually constrained to
a linear plotline, the cyber-actors rarely need to be more complex
than a low-level LAI program. Still, their involvement
drives up the price significantly.
==Digital Kingdoms==
A “digital kingdom” is a fully immersive
roleplaying environment, involving up to thousands of
players at a time. The simulation runs 24 hours per day; players
drop in and out as their real-world schedules permit. Multiple
plot threads are progressing at any given moment, with
more constantly being generated by AI or bio-sapient artists.
Synthespians, some of them high-end LAI or even SAI systems,
animate hundreds or thousands of NPCs. Digital kingdoms
tend to be fictional in nature. Anachronistic fantasies are
popular, as are science fiction and historical settings with varying
degrees of realism.