Steve Prentice, analyst and chief of research at Gartner Research, has been in the Island to speak to the Jersey branch of the British Computer Society.
Mr Prentice said that although virtual worlds were nothing new ? harking back to the early days of computer flight simulators and games like Dungeons and Dragons ? 3D computer technology was now considerably more powerful.
Although the earlier games had been targeted at world domination, more recently there had been a drive towards the use of virtual worlds for social networking.
