I agree about the overhead: as you point out, there are both technical components and cognitive. The issue, to me, is whether the benefits justify the cost. If your learning objective is inherently 3D and social (teamwork in an emergency, for example), it seems obvious.

The trick is when it’s more just social, and opportunistically 3D. Then the argument’s less clear. However, with a long term amortization of the use of the world, it may make sense.

And, as came up in last night’s , there does seem to be some psychological validity to the ephemeral ‘presence’ that individuals describe but is hard to ascribe to causal processes. Regardless, sufficient qualitative description is quantitatively valid.

Let me address this element of your discussion: you touch the reality of overhead without specifying its source. It seems that at some level yours is a sales argument for why someone (Google, Microsoft, the Sloan Foundation, the Department of Ed, Dept of Commerce, or the NEA) should do the right thing and provide the environment and the means for 3D/virtual conceptualization. The trick is that it is fundamentally an issue of resources, as even “the cloud” exists as an aggregate of individuals paying the tab. If it’s not going to be a publicly funded commodity, it will need a mechanism for monetizing access or usage in order to work.

There is a concurrent matter of cognitive/attentional resources. I suspect that one of the big reasons Twitter and the big social networking sites have exploded in success is their accessibility to a mobile public, with fairly low thresholds to participate and the push/pull of data flow is seen in one’s hands. I have yet to experience an immersive virtual world that doesn’t require a lot of bandwidth, processing power, and display capacity to really work the way it needs to. I’ll stop there, pontificate further if requested. SBJ