This chapter approaches the Real Virtuality theme that appears in the construction processes of Digital Virtual World in 3D in Metaverses. The authors present and discuss subtopics like “Virtuality and Reality: Virtual Reality Experiences and Real Virtuality Experiences in Immersive Learning,” “The Simultaneousness of Worlds: From the Digital Virtual Space of Coexistence to the Space of Hybrid and Multimodal Coexistence,” “The Culture of Real Virtuality.” The chapter concludes that it is possible to understand that i-Learning, through the Real Virtuality Experiences and Virtual Reality Experiences, may represent an effective possibility to subjects' education nowadays. In this context, the authors believe it is fundamental to (re) think Education for the current generation, the prospect of a Network Society, a Cultural Hybridism and Multimodality.
TopVirtuality And Reality: Virtual Reality Experiences And Real Virtuality Experiences In Immersive Learning
Virtuality, broadly speaking, is what has quality or virtual character, that is, the potential to accomplish something. The term is commonly used to refer to situations in which the action, communication, interaction does not occur in a physical classroom form in analog spaces but in a digital form, using different digital technologies in a web environment. As discussed in Chapter 3 - Metaverse, 3D Digital Virtual Worlds, the concept of Virtuality is related to the virtual and according to Lévy (1999), can be understood in the sense: technical - related to IT; current -“virtual” means “unreality” once “reality” presupposes a material realization, a tangible presence - it is believed that something must be either real or virtual, and therefore cannot have both qualities simultaneously, and; philosophical - the virtual is what exists only in capacity and not in fact, the force field that tends to be solved in an update. The virtual is prior to the formal or effective implementation:
The word virtual comes from the Medieval Latin virtualis, derived from virtus, strength, power. … In strictly philosophical terms, the virtual does not preclude the real, but the current: virtuality and actuality are only two ways to be different. (Lévy, 1996, p.15)
Can we then say that we virtualize different worlds through our thoughts, which in turn can be updated through different languages in the representation?
Thus, based on Lévy (1996), we can say that virtuality refers to everything that characterizes the detachment of time and space, “deterritorialization”. Yet, what can we say when this term is associated with the digital? Could we then think of a “territory” of another kind, as digital? In this case, the digital would be a form of accomplishing the virtual – that which is the virtual representation of a pre-known physical classroom space, which is simulated in the digital, is the virtual representation of an unknown imaginary space, which is conceived in digital. In both cases, what happens is an update, that is, the realization of which is in capacity and that in turn is accomplished in digital.