VR Environments
From Gothpoodle
Some of the more common VR environments include:
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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.
