Klastrup's Cataclysms

Some virtual world definitions:
A simulated environment that appears to have the characteristics of some other environment, and in which participants perceive themselves as interactive parts.
at http://www.atis.org/tg2k/_virtual_world.html (American National Standard for Telecommunications - Telecom Glossary 2000)

This is an area created on the computer which can be explored in three dimensions. The user navigates their way around with the use of the keyboard or mouse.
This found at Webwise, "The Internet made simple by BBC".

As Kalawsky93 explained, virtual environments (VE), also known as virtual reality, is a computer system that generates a three-dimensional graphical ambient known as virtual world, where the user experiences an effect called immersion (the sense of presence within the VE world), and he/she navigates through the virtual world and interacts with the graphical objects that reside within it, using special input/output devices.
This definition by someone working in the School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences.

Virtual reality: An artificial environment created with computer hardware and software and presented to the user in such a way that it appears and feels like a real environment. To "enter" a virtual reality, a user dons special gloves, earphones, and goggles, all of which receive their input from the computer system. In this way, at least three of the five senses are controlled by the computer. In addition to feeding sensory input to the user, the devices also monitor the user's actions. The goggles, for example, track how the eyes move and respond accordingly by sending new video input.
To date, virtual reality systems require extremely expensive hardware and software and are confined mostly to research laboratories.
The term virtual reality is sometimes used more generally to refer to any virtual world represented in a computer, even if it's just a text-based or graphical representation.
says the Internetnews.com Webopedia

Certain things are shared in common among all of the many inheritors of MUD1, and these things make up the core of what a mud is—and therefore, what a virtual world is today. These are:
1. A spatial representation of the virtual world

2. Avatar representation within the space

3. A sandbox to play in that offers persistence for some amount of the data represented within the virtual world

Anything that meets these criteria can profitably be called a mud for the sake of examining it and comparing features in the design to things that aren’t ashamed to use the term. And later
A mud is a spatially based depiction of a somewhat persistent virtual environment, which can be experienced by numerous participants at once, who are represented within the space by avatars.
This is found in the lexia "A Somewhat Strict Definition" at Raph Koster's website.

The software embodiment of the pseudo-collective object is a mediation tool based on a virtual world. This virtual world shares many of the defining characteristics of
Multiple User Domains (“MUDs,” Curtis 1992, Curtis & Nichols 1994), namely, that it is an interactive, multi-user, text-based virtual reality. The interactions among the users and the stable (or more-slowly-changing) organization of the surrounding environment create the “worldness” of the virtual world. The mediation tool differs from most other virtual worlds in a critical way, however. The typical virtual world is a simulated environment in which participants interact virtually, and independently of the external world. A simulation, that is, starts with seed values from the outside, and progresses of its own accord, executing its own internal logic. After some elapsed time, the observer can (if desired) compare the state of the simulation to possible states of the external world, and determine whether the simulation is an accurate model of the world. In the current case, however, the design of the virtual world (Zager 1999) is not a simulation. It is autopoietic (Maturana & Varela 1973) in nature, meaning that the virtual world stays structurally coupled to the world external to it, and hence the virtual world reflects changes to the state of the external world with commensurate changes to its own state.
as said by David Zager, Ph.D. in the article "Collaboration as an Activity - Coordinating with Pseudo-Collective Objects"

A nice metaphoric definition of virtual. And here you can search on virtual art projects.

# posted by Lisbeth at: 18:55