MercyHurst Virtual Worlds Initiative
By Roderick Jones
MercyHurst College has a new exhibit on virtual worlds, which is well worth visiting.
The project is called Maleperduys and the website can be linked to here. The project examines virtual worlds from a wide variety of angles including terrorism, espionage and crime.
In its own words the site is a "... a custom intelligence analysis produced by graduate students at the Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies. The goal of this analysis is to illuminate the implications of the emergence and evolution of virtual worlds (VWs) to US national security. "
The exhibit also runs in its own custom browser based virtual world on the Just Leap In platform, which can be linked to via the website. This neatly demonstrates the value of virtual worlds in presenting information in a cogent virtual fashion.