By Chris Kauza
Technology Editor
If you have any involvement in Virtual Worlds, you may recognize that I am referring to a not-so-unusual attendance list for a business meeting in Second Life. The meeting I recently attended was a great opportunity to experience a presentation slide show in an entirely new way.
Video games aren't entirely about stealing cars, shooting aliens, going on quests or eating dots on a screen. There is a segment of the industry known as Serious Games, which refers to uses such as training classes, business simulations, etc. And it is in this segment where we find a game you may have heard of, called Second Life from Linden Labs. (Here is a video giving a non-technical explanation of what Second Life is, using a gardening analogy...)
Erica Driver is an Immersive Internet industry analyst, formerly with Forrester Research, now in her own firm (ThinkBalm). She (quite literally) walked about a dozen of us through a presentation on the business applications of Second Life. Indeed, the slides were arranged in a circle formation, in a field, and I was able to focus on, zoom-in / zoom-out, etc., on those points that most interested me
Personally, I first went "in world" and viewed Second Life about three years ago, and found it to be painfully slow, very buggy, and limited in its functionality and feature set. Last night was my first time back and I found the whole experience to very exciting - everything seemed to have really moved forward quite a bit.
Second Life hosts more than 15.5 Million residents, and you will find more than 350,000 of them "in-world", during a typical 7-day period. For the month ending September, 2008, there was roughly $7.3 Million dollars (USD) of in-world transactions.
Did I get your attention?
Erica went on to point out that approximately 16% of Second Life residents use the environment for work, and about half of these (approximately 1.24 Million people) intend to increase their usage of Second Life in the coming year. Further, 90% of surveyed Second Life residents stated that they would like to interact with "real life" brands while in Second Life. What are some of the ways they anticipate using this technology?
- training and collaboration (Michelin IT for Enterprise Architecture training; The George Washington University Medical Center using "Virtual Heroes" video game designed to increase proficiency of medical professionals (see a video demo here))
- remote monitoring & management of data centers / remote facilities management (ex - Implenia and IBM's Virtual Data Center))
- data visualization and analysis
- augmenting (or supplementing) trade show presence (ex - Aldrich Chemistry)
- product launches and training (ex - Microsoft)
- sales / sales demonstrations (ex - VoxVue & Aldrich Chemistry)
- brand awareness and building (ex. - Accenture Careers Island)
- concept prototyping
What does this have to do with "networking"?
Everything!
Two key aspects of networking are:
1. how you represent your company's / organization's brand
2. how non-company people interact with, or react to, your brand
8 years ago, blogging was dismissed as a communication medium. Now many companies and executives blog on behalf of their companies (this article is itself being written and published through a blog).
Should you create a presence in Second Life right now? It depends.
In my personal opinion, Second Life still has some technical issues to contend with (their back-end infrastructure, mostly), and it can be a "bit buggy" or slow to the uninitiated. However, the day is fast approaching where your customers / partners / suppliers may expect you to have a Virtual World presence, so getting involved and starting to "figure it out" now may not be a bad idea. And don't forget - what you do here should be in alignment with what you do "off line". Use these technologies to develop and enhance your brand.
We have been discussing this exact idea here at the Soltus Group. For now, we have placed it "on hold" but developing a Virtual World presence is part of our 3-year business plan. We are observing and doing some limited participation, but we have no avatar with which to speak to the aforementioned Industry Analyst, Purple-haired Goth and Griffin.
Not yet, anyway...but, if you allow yourself, you may begin to see art, relationships - your world - in a whole new way.
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