Object Design in Virtual Immersive Environments

The Pervasiveness of Digital Technology

Digital technology has changed our lives and how we work: it is accessible, pervasive, easy to use, and lowers barriers. Digital design technology has also significantly become more accessible and easy to use and has contributed to the dissolution of discipline specific boundaries traditionally drawn along material and dimensional lines and erode individual-centric making. We are in a new era with new tools and new ways of working. There has been a paradigm shift. For most of us, we have been holding the tiger by the tail. First we began to use the web as a primary information source albeit in a static read-only form. Moving to a decentralized dynamic flat web where users generated content through peer production methods, with information flowing in all directions, we began participating in email listservs, blogs, Flickr, and Facebook, contributing information and looking for the most current information in these places. We started aggregating information socially through wikis and sites like Del.ici.ous and networking socially online through Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, and Twitter; and all the while discovering new ways of working, knowing, collaborating, and co-creating, through an ever increasing variety of Web 2.0 tools. These tools come together exponentially with the emergent and dynamic immersive web. Through VIEs we have highly engaging, cost-effective, post-geographic, collaborative ways of working that afford synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities. The ubiquity of digital technology have ushered in an era in which social production is king and collaboration is key.