Universcity: Towards a holistic approach to educational virtual city design

In this paper, we seek to develop a holistic approach to educational virtual cities, introducing a concept of `Universcity´ as a framework for a wide range of social, cultural and educational activities, a city for students, researchers and other learners to live and work in. The metaphor of a city is widely used in the design of virtual worlds. However, a systematic approach to learning support in virtual cities is not fully developed yet. To fill the gap, we consider a city as a place for lifelong learning, with a broad spectrum of disciplines and areas of knowledge. We have investigated these aspects in the implementation of two projects where virtual reality was used for the contextualization of educational activities. Based on the experiences from these projects and related work, we propose an initial design of `Universcity´.