The Writing Team

The writing team for this book was originally brought together to write an essay about 3D virtual immersive environments for the eLearning Guild’s 360̊ report titled Synchronous Learning Systems (SLS) Benchmarks, Best Practices, and Real-Time Analysis about Real-Time Learning. The research director of the Guild was familiar with the work of both. Karl had been teaching in in 3D spaces for years and Tony had experience working in 3D spaces while at IBM and more recently at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. The Guild’s director of research had a feeling that putting the two of them together would create a dynamic, thought-leading essay for the report.

The director was right. The essay Karl and Tony wrote called Escaping Flatland: The Emergence of 3D Synchronous Learning was nothing short of ground breaking. It immediately caught the attention of the 3D virtual world learning community.. Shortly after the essay went public, Karl and Tony received requests to expand the essay and their leading edge thinking into a book for both practitioners and theorists who were attempting to create virtual immersive environments for learning and collaboration.

Originally the two vowed to keep the book short, under 200 pages, but the energy, innovation and pioneering spirit taking place in the 3D virtual world community was too vigorous and growing too fast. The book soon mushroomed into over 400 information packed pages before the authors were forced to stop and release it.

The result is a book that lays the foundation for the future of all learning and collaboration in 3D virtual immersive environments. The authors included a comprehensive model for thinking about interacting in 3D spaces, provided design principles for building in 3D and developed learning archetypes to help instructional designers, academics and others to build useful, exciting and educational virtual learning spaces.