Just over a year ago I blogged :Baylor College Of Medicine Utilising Second Life To Aid Women With Physical Limitations Lose Weight. That post looked at a program designed to help women lose weight when exercise is not really an option due to their physical limitations.
Fast forward to January 29th and wheelchair user Terri O’Hare has blogged about her experience of the program. The post is not too lengthy but well worth a read. Terri explains how it was with some major reluctance that she entered the virtual world of Second Life, due to the fact that she thought it would be largely inhabited by thirteen year old boys. However, she soon discovered that this was not the case :
At first I strongly resisted Second Life (SL), figuring it was a fantasy world full of 13 year-old boys. But then I actually entered it after a training session and walked, flew, and jumped around the beautiful “world” our program instructors built just for us.
That space included a workout area complete with yoga, bicycles, rock climbing and more. Terri also describes how she became attached to her avatar.
I especially liked seeing myself (meaning my ‘avatar’) high kicking a punching bag over and over with no achy muscles or loss of balance. Talk about therapeutic!
Terri also describes how the lack of physical limitations that she would face in the real world was empowering. However the important question is did this program actually work? How useful was it? Terri states :
You may be wondering how useful a virtual workout is in a digital world that isn’t real? I felt it created a strong message through my neural pathways in the brain when watching “me” perform physical feats I couldn’t do IRL (In Real Life, another SL abbreviation).
There’s more in Terri’s post, it’s a very interesting read and displays some of the powers of the virtual world format that are not often highlighted. As virtual worlds grow, there will be more and more use cases that we don’t initially expect to see, and most of them are fascinating to read about.
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