Word: dadaworld
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Koreans have found that cyberspace can be a place for healing. In June last year, a fire incinerated a kindergarten holiday camp near the west coast, killing 19 children. The tragedy shocked many South Koreans, including entrepreneur Shin Yoo Jin. Shin is building an elaborate three-dimensional cybercity called Dadaworld, where you can shop, visit an art gallery or a police station, even do the macarena. He decided to add a virtual memorial to the dead children...
Shin created a spacious hall with slabs of virtual stone to house the memorial. Like the rest of Dadaworld, it is a three-dimensional space: visitors use "avatars"--cyberfigures incarnating individual people or characters--to navigate a broad stairway and enter the hall, where pictures of the deceased children hang on the wall. Visitors can click on icons to see more pictures and video clips of the victims or ponder messages left by grieving parents. Parents can even ask to see computer-generated avatars of their children. One father took his avatar son for a walk in the virtual garden...
Even Shin concedes that Dadaworld may be a little ahead of its time. But other pioneers are sure to push the envelope still further. After all, South Korea is a country that does nothing by half measures. Competitive and hyperkinetic, Koreans are deploying a typical energy and creativity to the Web that meshes nicely with the ethos of the Internet. Though Web mania seems a little over the top at times--does the world need $300 identity rings?--the ideas churning out of South Korea's Internet "lab" could one day make the rest of the world cough up real...
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