Comments on: Virtual Worlds: Immersive Training, Collaboration and Meetings

By: Jeffrey Phillips

Jeffrey Phillips — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:35:08 +0000

We (OVO Innovation) just completed a fascinating innovation project helping a client envision the future of retail spaces using Second Life. While there are some technical challenges behind a corporate firewall, you can see how powerful this technology can be in accelerating and improving innovation projects, especially for distributed teams. Here’s a link to a white paper we wrote about that project and the use of Second Life:
http://www.innovationmanagement.se/2011/05/26/immersive-virtual-worlds-as-innovation-platforms/

By: Simon Mackie

Simon Mackie — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 08:59:40 +0000

Thanks for the comment Ron. I would note that it’s definitely not the case of Aliza “rediscovering” anything; she’s been banging the virtual worlds drum for years.

By: Amelia@ IT Management

Amelia@ IT Management — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 23:20:07 +0000

With the advent of excellent IT management tools, globalization, and outsourcing, virtual office environments will easily thrive. This is just part of the working evolution. Company executives are now beginning to see the benefits of having a virtual presence.

However, virtual worlds are of no use without an effective IT management tool. The use of remote desktop would be a great example.

By: Ron T Blechner

Ron T Blechner — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:32:20 +0000

I’m really disappointed with this article. It’s another example of the media having 5-year amnesia cycles, forgetting what happened with technology, and re-”discovering” it and making the same old mistakes.

The Unisfair study is a good lead-in, and that’s about the only fresh information in the article.

1. Team Meetings – the author ignores the primary reason Second Life failed to gain Enterprise traction: Firewalls and private networks. You can’t “easily” do voice, heck – Second Life search doesn’t even work through most corporate firewalls. Many enterprises don’t allow Google Docs, and there’s still no support for integration with desktop sharing with Second Life.

2. Collaboration sessions: The author’s suggestion is “make a sandbox”, aka, literally – provide employees with an empty area. Seriously? Why not talk about the training involved, how to get employees interested in this? The unspoken assumption is that simply providing a tool means employees will use it, and that almost never works.

3. Training: You talk about simulacrum – campuses and virtual stores. This is merely the tip of the iceberg of possibilities. Yes, role-playing for training is a good suggestion, but how about augmenting the environment? Providing step-by-step equipment training? What are the toolsets needed to implement education? What sort of strategies work?

4. Streaming a physical world event into a virtual world does not make it “hybrid”. It just means people are sitting in Second Life watching a video feed. “Hybrid” is perhaps the worst buzz term to evolve in the last few years, because it’s used to mean five or six different things, including 2-D “virtual event spaces” which are hardly more than NetMeeting windows. Want a truly hybrid event? There are examples of meetings where there are both physical and virtual attendees, and cameras take images from each world so that they can see and interact with each other. Virtualis’ offering is one of many many companies offering virtual space, but this does not make a hybrid / mixed-reality event in and of itself. Why mention them at all?

5 In general – the author mentions a handful of providers, when there are dozens and dozens of different companies with a wide, varied offering of services for businesses. This narrow viewpoint is about 6 years out of date where the industry is nowadays. Today it’s about choice, and integrating social media, mobile, providing tools for collaboration, and so on.