"Inner Listening" as a Basic Principle for Developing Immersive Virtual Worlds.

Abstract Ludmil Duridanov and Simeon Simoff call in their paper “'Inner Listening' as a Basic Principle for Developing Immersive Virtual Worlds” for an approach that focuses on visualisation as an important way of analysing a Virtual World. They argued that immersive Virtual Worlds have developed on ad-hoc basis, driven mainly by the need for creating inhabited places for virtual communities and environments for distributed gameplay. The goal of achieving immersion has been mainly pursued using convincing 3D interactive graphics technology and the approaches to design have focused on the visualisation aspects, neglecting the “audio design” and the consistent integration of visual and audio designs. As the collaborative and community-related aspects of these environments are expected to be dominant in the future, the authors argue that there is a clear need to develop deeper underlying principles for the design of these inhabited virtual spaces. They conclude that Virtual Worlds of the future should be places that allow for a creative and enlightened state of mind by their inhabitants. Thereby two sources of wisdom – the Judeo-Islamic and Buddhist tradition – should be explored for establishing the principle of “inner listening” as one of the basic principles for developing immersive Virtual Worlds.