Virtual Dating

african american virtual dating

Virtual dating combines online dating with online gaming. It is distinguished from online dating by the absence of an intention of the people to personally meet. Virtual dating involves the use of avatars for people to interact in a virtual venue that resembles a real life dating environment. For example, individuals can meet and chat in a romantic virtual cafe in Paris or on a Caribbean resort.

According to Scientific American, virtual dating is “the next step in online dating” (Feb/March 2007, p.35).

A Time Magazine article entitled “Internet Dating 2.0″ was published on January 19, 2007 citing current and upcoming technologies and explains how people can now connect in a virtual dating environment. Time describes how websites are allowing people to meet for an avatar based, graphically enabled virtual date without leaving their homes.

According to NBC  and TIME, OmniDate is one example of virtual dating.

Researchers at MIT and Harvard have found that “people who had had a chance to interact with each other (by computer only) on a virtual tour of a museum subsequently had more successful face-to-face meetings than people who had viewed only profiles.”

The role of social networking services in online dating has been explored in a book dedicated to the subject [11]. The findings of the study reveal that the online dating services driven by subscriptions offer the least amount of social networking opportunities, as they often only utilize the personal homepage genre of online community, which only makes them effective for the bonding and encoding stage of the relationship. The dating services modeled on the free-at-the-point-of-use model scored much higher as many of them utilized the Circle of Friends social networking method and a wider number of online community genres. The highest scoring dating service was Facebook, which uses the personal homepage genre, the message board genre, the weblog and directory genre, as well as utilizing the Circle of Friends. The second highest scoring, Second Life utilizes virtual worlds, message boards, chat groups and profile pages to allow people to contact in a three-dimensional environment.