New Association Promotes Virtual Worlds and Business

Dave Elchoness has a vision – a hallway that will reach around the globe. Well, maybe not exactly that, but the former outsourcing executive from Qwest talks about the "global hallway", a virtual space where users can meet from around the globe.

“We know that real work doesn't get done in three hour meeting or conferences. Instead, a chance meeting in the hallway or a "drive by" into your office, is what really gets ideas shared and work accomplished,” he says .

“But for the spontaneous office chat, there's nothing that comes close to virtual worlds. Imagine a small box in the corner of your computer screen. You see your partner's avatar walk by and remember that you had something to ask. You get a great idea, so you walk your avatar to your colleague's office for a quick chat.”

Now the lawyer qua HR consultant will have the opportunity to put those ideas to test. Elchoness is the new executive director of Association of Virtual Worlds, a fledgling association that was started by Edita Kaye, the editor-in-chief of iViNNIe, a virtual world news networks that aims to promote the use of virtual world technology in business.

While powerful, SecondLife remains ill suited for serious business collaboration for a variety of many reasons. It’s too difficult to download the software for most business users. The software is too bloated for most office laptops or desktops. People don’t have the time to learn how to use it and to design an avatar. Automatically logging people out of the network may make operational sense, but not for business who would likely run their virtual world in a small window on their desktop, referring to it periodically. What’s more the outages and rolling upgrades that occur in the system can make it very difficult to schedule a meeting, notes Elchoness.

What he wants is to create a 3D based web solution that runs in the browser and can be accessible directly from the company’s web site. The graphics may not be as rich as in SecondLife, but would be rich enough to be immersive. Association members would be able to build out their virtual offices and then link them together through an organic network. Numerous providers, such as 3DExplorer provide the basic tools for creating that sort of work.

Membership in the Association will require some minor dues. The money would be used to promote the technology through white papers, articles and other marketing and social networking efforts .

I think Elchoness and the Association are headed on the right track. Anyone who’s spent time in SecondLife intuits that collaboration could take a huge step forward when done properly. In thinking through the issues that an organization may require from its virtual world, the Association should also consider:

1. Add VoIP to the System – IM may be appropriate for casual conversation, but more serious work needs robust VoIP. The association should be sure to develop a SIP interface into is V-World implementation and test that implementation with the leading telephony switches.
2. Sensor tracking – This might be too “Big Brother-ish” for some, but I think the V-World should have the ability detect location of individuals in the physical world to avoid the artificial construct of having to “walk to the water cooler” in the V-World. This means an option for sensors that can detect when are at the water cooler or in the conference room and change the V-World accordingly. To some extent this is already being done with location-based presence in the mobile world.
3. Facial feature recognition – The technology already exists for recognizing when someone might smile, for example, and changing the avatar accordingly. The same technology should be deployed here to increase the immersive quality of these worlds and simplify the interface.