Companies Explore Virtual Worlds As Collaboration Tools

– C.G. Lynch, CIO February 06, 2008 "The phrase virtual world is often associated with Second Life, the much-hyped 3-D environment hosted by Linden Lab that allows users to talk to friends, sell T-shirts, fly around on carpets and even build amusement parks—in other words, to play... In fact, as the consumer buzz over Second Life has faded, organizations like the I-95 Corridor Coalition, accountancy PricewaterhouseCoopers and healthcare technology provider Greenleaf Medical have quietly explored business uses for virtual worlds. From setting up 3-D environments for geographically dispersed workers to giving therapy to troubled teens, early adopters are testing virtual worlds as a collaborative tool. Industry analysts and developers of virtual worlds believe that by immersing users in an interactive environment that allows for social interactions, virtual worlds have the potential to succeed where other collaborative technologies, like teleconferencing, have failed. Phone-based meetings begin and end abruptly, at the mercy of the person or service administering it. In a virtual world, conversations between employees can continue within the virtual space—just like they do in company hallways after a meeting ends. "The informality of a virtual world can lead to great conversations," says Roo Reynolds, an IBM researcher who is working on a virtual world for Big Blue employees. "It leads to discussions that otherwise would have been missed with the formality of older technologies." However, businesses must overcome many technical and cultural obstacles before they adopt virtual worlds on a major scale. The technology often lacks robust audio capabilities that business users need to communicate, and it can be frustratingly slow without a high-performance desktop. Meanwhile, users have to get over the novelty of working as their virtual selves. And there's a learning curve for older workers who didn't grow up with richly rendered video games. Perhaps even more important than the technical challenges, companies must tackle the issue of workers' online identities. People's 3-D representations, known as avatars, must be constructed in such a way that allows users of virtual worlds to have faith they're talking to the right colleague. Security challenges abound; most companies using virtual worlds today do so on a public or externally hosted platform with limited options to protect corporate data. ... "The 30-and-younger crowd will pick this up in a few minutes," says University of Maryland's Pack. "That doesn't mean the older folks won't get it too, but it will take a little longer." Even once users learn their way around, PWC's Reichental says you need to allow for the novelty factor to wear off. But he adds that this can be a pretty painless process with some users. "Our first meeting [in a virtual world], as you'd expect, people stood on tables and had fun and roamed around," he says. "Remarkably, though, by the second meeting, people became engaged and were ready to talk." Are Virtual Worlds Right for You? - Driver believes using virtual worlds for meetings and training is the tip of the iceberg. She imagines that in five years, each knowledge worker will have about four monitors on her desk, perhaps with one dedicated to the Internet and e-mail and the rest to internal and external virtual worlds where people collaborate with colleagues and customers. But to get started, you have to understand what virtual worlds offer today. Yarmis has spent a lot of time in Second Life, and suggests that people interested in virtual worlds for business do the same. "To grasp what's really going on, you need to make a commitment to spend a number of hours there. That's the only way you can see how rich an experience it really is," he says. As end-user companies wait, big tech vendors have begun building and testing new virtual worlds on themselves. At IBM, developers are building the Metaverse, a place for Big Blue's employees to meet informally. Sun Microsystems, meanwhile, is developing MPK20, a virtual world extension to its 19-building facility in Menlo Park, Calif. According to Nicole Yankelovich, one of the project leads, at any given time more than half of Sun's employees work remotely (which Sun encourages because it reduces the need for office space and has environmental benefits). Virtual worlds are a compelling alternative to the boring old audio conference. "We need a way to bring everyone together and get some informal brainstorming going," she says. Accessing MPK20 from the comfort of her home might help Yankelovich and her colleagues avoid the traffic on that wide stretch of concrete near their Burlington, Mass., office, known as I-95—a place the I-95 Corridor Coalition's first responders hope they won't have to visit, at least in real life, anytime soon.