e-Learning: Managing the opportunity of virtual worlds and their environments

The opportunities presented by virtual world applications in support of e-Learning are many and varied. Advancing complexity of these software systems and their increasing interaction with their environment is set to increase dramatically in the near future. The requirement for robust virtual world e-Learning systems which respond to changes within their own environment is made more urgent by the fact that the popularity of such systems are presenting designers with critical issues related to performance when presented with many simultaneous users and increasingly complex functionality, which often leads to a degradation in performance levels. Software development will require software to adapt to its operating environment in order to operate robustly and virtual worlds are no exception. For virtual world software to maintain performance levels in the face of these challenges it will be vital to be able to model the environment in which these worlds operates.