Let’s say you have a friend, neither phile nor phobe who doesn’t have experience of virtual worlds. He or she has heard that Secondlife can be an interesting alternative to TV but its main potential appears to be a dry run for gender reassignment therapy.  What could you point to by way of  evidence that  Entropia,  Activeworlds and all the rest have an, eh, real world purpose?  Where do they work and why?

The following two cases are drawn from the area of corporate training but the lessons are general. I don’t have first hand experience of either – I am relying on publicly accessible information including their video demo. This shouldn’t be an issue as I am not reviewing the quality of the products, rather my assessment of how well they make it clear virtual worlds offer something genuinely new.

Virtual meetings

Firstly virtual meeting software from Forterrainc – profiled by business week here .  If you haven’t heard of them they are a successful private company supplying Virtual World simulation capability in the defence, medical, scientific and education sectors.

Forterra Inc

Their platform is called OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) and their brochure nails, in my view, what VW’s are for:

1. meetings
2. events
3. training simulations

The sceptic might be more inclined to grant the benefit of VW’s for simulation and raise an eyebrow re the value of virtual events.  In fact, as anyone who has attended one of the excellent education conferences / events in SL can attest, events are a proven success.

Meetings make up the most frequent of the above three virtual world purposes and therefore the most likely to create that “aha!” moment of realisation for the first time VW user.

Now I have used virtual meeting products for years such as Elluminate and Interwise. If you can get over having to put your hand up to speak and make your peace with saying your piece into a vacuum, they beat phone conferencing on every count for remote team working and management.  Hundreds of hours of Second Life meetings later, I am personally convinced of the fact that Vw’s offer a real leap forward in collaborative potential.  But this is about the sceptic.  If he / she doesn’t work for a company such as IBM with a fabled commitment to VW’s – indeed with a virtual ethic,  I’m guessing a virtual world meeting product seems like overkill.

Will the sceptic see the point of creating a virtual embodiment so he / she can fine tune a document collaboratively, however good the OLIVE platform or IBM product may be for this.? Surely Elluminate / Adobe connect or Cisco’s WebEx will continue to be a more likely choice.  And that is a pity because, without the requirement to attend an event or be trained in a simulation, that person will continue not to ‘get’ VW’s for training or anything else.

And in the blue corner ..

The Novicraft Awareness raising game from Teaming Stream and Ludocraft is more of a one-off but so why might it be easier to see the point than with something like a regular meeting facilitator?  Have a look at the demo video here.

Screenshot from Novicraft demo

Well the virtual world element appears to merge nicely with rather than replace a process we are familiar with. The fantasy element enriches rather than works against the ‘real work’ ethic partly because the aim of a team building day is to get away from things and the   exagerated virtual aspects may lighten the mood.  Don’t forget the ability to review performance in a subsequent phase.

So my guess is that one may be seen as more useful than the other but both offer a defined packaged service which contrasts with the blank canvas approach of SecondLife.

Novicraft screen shot 2

Tags: e-learning, SecondLife, virtual worlds