Blog: Dan Power: An island called Iowa

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An island called Iowa

Most of my friends in the decision support community know I live in Cedar Falls, Iowa. In my opinion, Cedar Falls is a very liveable place in the Cedar River valley of Iowa. I was born and raised about 10 miles from where I now live in the neighboring city of Waterloo. The State of Iowa has been the home of my family, parents, grandparents and great grandparents for more than 125 years. Iowa is called the heartland of the USA. Looking at a map shows that Iowa is the fertile land between two great American rivers, the Mississippi and Missouri. So Iowa is a great place to call home and because of my attachment to Iowa, I recently started a new venture to promote my home State. My goal is also to do some fun things in addition to my Decision Support World research projects in the virtual world of Second Life. My new venture is called Iowa Metaverse, Inc., a Nonprofit Iowa 501(c)(3) corporation.

If you do or have lived in Iowa, want to live in Iowa, have good friends in Iowa or want a great place to visit, join the Second Life group called Iowa and visit Iowa in Second Life. As I mentioned in my last blog post my plan is to use Virtual Iowa to explore location decisions by individuals and organizations, vacation decisions by individuals and college choice decisions. I will also enjoy being in both the real Iowa and Virtual Iowa.

So I will explore if a virtual world experience can impact human choice behaviors. Much of the Web content has been about providing information. My sense is that riding a bike in Virtual Iowa will encourage some people to come to the real Iowa for a "real" bike ride. Also, experiencing a College or plant facility in a virtual world may impact intentions regarding the real place.

Now I need to figure out how to design and specify requirements for the 3D user interface that will be Iowa. A 3D space of 512 meters by 512 meters is more complex to design than a Website and certainly much more complex than a single Web page.

I keep very busy and multi-task and the metaverse helps me tremendously.

For more information about Virtual Iowa, contact:

Daniel J. Power aka Leinad Meriman
email: power@iowametaverse.com

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