ABSTRACT
This chapter explores visual culture does not only include art and design, but also includes everything that humans create and can see in daily life. The virtual world is not only a new realm for people to live in and travel through, but it is also a place for people, known as avatars, to create their own visual culture. Cultural ideas and values are maintained by visual images; images communicate, teach, and transmit the behavior, ideas, and values of culture. Images from the visual culture point of view, as M. Sturken and L. Cartwright state, “are both encoded and decoded”. Virtual world content creators who produce, transform, and manipulate different cultures in the virtual environment visually are actually forming a new culture. Cognitive Gestalt psychologists A. M. S. Barry and R. T. Kellogg assert that synthesizing and integrating visual images and mental images facilitate people’s visual experience to future visual perception and finally help people structure knowledge.
