Virtual Worlds Are My Lifelong Ideal

As a child, the moment I closed my eyes at night I entered another world.

In a quiet, peaceful village, at the end of a tree-lined path, stood a simple house. In it lived a boy slightly older than me, radiating warmth. My everyday questions, the sting of my parents' criticism, a bad grade, the thrill of tomorrow's school trip — I brought them all to him. He kept me company, encouraged me, answered everything.

I never exactly lost that ability. I just became more "rational and objective": I know he was a character my mind invented, that I was only talking to myself. And with that knowledge, the vivid realness of those scenes — the full-body empathy of them — never came back.

I want to build a virtual world where children grow rich inner lives, pulled along by raw curiosity and the urge to explore.

And I want to build a virtual world where adults recover the original heart of their youth, explore their inner selves, and stay safe from this world's "viruses."

In his book on virtual reality, Dr. Zhai Zhenming wrote that technological progress will give virtual worlds a genuine state of immersion — reconstructing us at the level of being. Life, he argued, will only grow more virtual.

The intersection that truly fascinates me is education. Studying is an act "against human nature": attention is born to drift toward whatever is more interesting. Games are different — curiosity, achievement and reward pull people naturally into flow. That is why someone can play for hours without fatigue but cannot study for one.

Merging games and learning — making study interesting, meaningful, self-driven — is what I am working on.

The path has changed several times over the years: from gamified course ideas to, today, building small AI applications for education and productivity, one by one. The means keep changing. The ideal never has. It was settled long ago, on those nights when another world was one closed eyelid away.