No abstract

Information and Computer Technologies have produced new generation interaction methods and services to support human activities, offering evolutionary learning procedures. 3D Virtual Worlds are sophisticated platforms supporting a set of human activities, enriching the way we learn, work and socialize. They are platforms that can support a constructivist learning approach of medical students, based on methods at the edge of technology inducing a team spirit and enhanced collaboration experience. In our work, we introduce the concept of e-learning through virtual worlds in medical and healthcare education, providing a literature review on the field. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of virtual worlds in healthcare, we provide a comparison of the most popular platforms, while some open research issues are being considered in the conclusion.

Virtual Worlds evolution is breaking the barriers of virtual isolation, thus allowing users to participate in geographically dispersed and culturally diverse places. At the same time, mobile agents have been established as a solid programming method for heterogeneous networking and computing environments. Our work focuses on the definition of a distributed Virtual World reference platform for enhanced users' experience. Towards interconnecting virtual worlds with mobile agents, we have further enriched the concept of a human‐like appearance avatar. We propose two distributed virtual world architectures, namely loose and tight. In parallel, we present a relevant implementation scheme along with experimental results that prove the performance enhancements achieved against the classic client/server model. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.