This week, Namaara was the guest of our Meta Entrepreneurship class. Namara made a presentation to our students on the importance of community building, social value, and sustainability in virtual worlds. Namaara started her presentation at our virtual campus sustainable development goals area which is designed by our graduated students within the scope of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye project. She started her presentation by explaining the importance of the concept of sustainability and defined the concept of sustainable value creation. She then explained the contributions that shopping from local producers and local businesses can make to a sustainable society. She gave farmers' markets as an example. She emphasized that supporting local producers in this way could prevent small businesses that have difficulty growing from going bankrupt. After giving a general introduction to the subject, Namaara began to explain what they were doing in the metaverse.
Stating that the concept of Metaverse first emerged in 1992 from a novel called 'Snow Crash', Namaara stated that as companies began to see metaverse platforms as a business area, the economic dimension of this concept was also opened to discussion.
Namaara stated that online communications have become stronger with the metaverse and thus physical products have begun to transform into digital products. She stated that thus, by reducing physical production, there may be less resource use and that metaverse platforms can contribute to sustainability in this way. Namaara also emphasized that activities that can be carried out at very high costs in real life can be carried out at much more affordable costs through Second Life, thus saving a large amount of money economically, and gave the example of 'Etopia Island'.
After her presentation on campus, Namaara organized a short tour of this area for our students to explain the 'Etopia Island' example and gave information about the area to the students. There were NPC avatars in the area, and written information about sustainability was given through these NPCs. It was also possible to obtain more detailed information through notecard givers located in different parts of the area. During the tour in the area, our students saw different area designs. The lesson ended after the completion of the Etopia Island tour. Our students stated that they were very pleased with this presentation.
We thank Namaara for her presentation and tour of the field.
