Virtual World Advantages & Disadvantage

Virtual Reality Pros & Cons

       Virtual Reality is imaginably more personal than electronic mail or instant messaging, or even a letter or a telephone call. It is a great social leveler, it may find a common ground across differences in age, culture. People are drawn together by similar interests instead of purely by geographic location. Communication are both challenging and rewarding, more effective and productive, and thus more enjoyable 

       Virtual reality offers tremendous opportunity for every 'connected' person to find his or her field and/or discipline .After using a medium that provides total freedom of expression face-to-face communication may be found to be too confining. When applied to therapeutics, virtual reality can allow people with disabilities to experience places and tasks that are otherwise unavailable to them. A person in a wheelchair can play a basketball game with the aid of Virtual reality. A person undergoing psychotherapy to confront a past event can do so safely in a virtual reality world without the fear of physical harm.
The advantages of virtual reality extend to the realms of design and architecture. Computer-aided design allows architects to build and envision a structure to eliminate any potential problems before money is spent actualizing the design. Fashion designers can put together fantastic creations and see how they move and look before mass-manufacturing their collection. Those who design safety features such as emergency exits or rescue equipment can see their designs in play without having to manufacture a prototype and conduct costly testing. Learning how to react to any given situation, especially a life-or-death situation, is one of the prime advantages of virtual reality. Military exercises performed in a virtual reality environment save lives. Exercises designed to train military personnel allow service members to experience a high-pressure situation without the threat of danger or death. These exercises can be performed over and over again until the person feels comfortable and confident in that situation, a scenario that is improbable and not feasible when engaging in real-life training exercises. Productivity also benefits from virtual reality. “Telepresence” refers to a type of technology that allows a person to feel as if he or she were present in another location. Used in the business world as a form of telecommunications, telepresence allows a person to conduct intimate business transactions in all corners of the world without ever leaving his place of residence.

 Even the most basic virtual reality hardware and software highlights another of the disadvantages of virtual reality, namely the cost. Socially, some of the disadvantages of virtual reality as entertainment have already started to surface, even without an experience that fully removes a person from his or her surrounding stimuli. One issue is social isolation, in which the user of virtual reality relies more on interactions that take place in a virtual world than on experiences in the real world. This lack of true, physical interaction has the potential to create incorrect associations that are not part of real social settings. The isolation could eventually cause depression, disassociation and other conditions, if it is severe enough. Another of the possible psychological and social disadvantages of virtual reality is desensitization. If some users were to use virtual reality for entertainment extensively, then they could run the risk of failing to recognize the true consequences for actions in which they are taking part or are viewing. When translated to the real world, in an extreme case, this could cause a lack of understanding of the effects of some actions when performed outside the virtual environment.

It is an inescapable aspect of social life is the formation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. People assume interaction to be substituted for community. It provides a communication environment in which the dangers of deception and the benefits of creativity are amplified beyond the levels that humans currently experience in their interpersonal interactions. It could lead to low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness and insignificance, even self-destructive acts. One of the largest disadvantages of virtual reality is that the technology required for an immersive or natural experience has remained elusive.