Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must either revise our conception of consciousn...

Virtual worlds as places are networked environments that may look like the physical world as well as create a sense of place for a person to communicate, navigate, and do things. The virtual world, as a basis for creating a virtual learning environment, has the advantages of providing a familiar and rich environment that is inherently collaborative. The familiarity comes from the likeness of th...

In 1976 Stephen Hawking proposed that information may be lost from our universe as a pure quantum state collapses gravitationally into a black hole, which then evaporates completely into a mixed state of thermal radiation. Although this proposal is controversial, it is tempting to consider analogous processes that might occur in certain theories of consciousness. For example, one might postulat...

In this paper we describe a proposal for a new virtual worlds representation model that requires just a few additional efforts from the world creators, and adds a basic semantic level to the worlds which is useful to improve the interaction of the users with these worlds. We also describe a querying model that allows to found worlds and objects in these worlds, using as a base the proposed repr...

Teaching physical security can be difficult since classes generally do not have access to physical structures to assess. The purpose of this study was to investigate a new way of teaching physical security using Second Life and to see if there is a difference in performance related to mode of instruction. The research question sought to determine whether there was a significant difference in st...

This short report presents the progress of the PhD project which aims to improve the mobility of visually impaired Web users. The thesis of this PhD project is that “Web pages could be analysed for identifying travel objects and their roles, in consequence they could be annotated with semantic metadata so that a tool could be devised to transform Web pages in a way that the objects could play t...

In this paper, we present a collaborative tabletop game which combines both the real and virtual world. The main motivation for this game was to augment a traditional board game with additional digital content. Users have to work together and place domino pieces in each level. We present the implementation including the hardware components and the software implementation, describe the game desi...