Tony O'Driscoll, who will chair the 2nd 3D Training, Learning and Collaboration (3DTLC) Conference taking place in September in San Jose, and Margaret Regan, of the Future Work Institute, recently sat down with Robert Bloomfield in a virtual session to discuss, among other things, how virtual worlds and enterprise will move forward together in the future. The event was hosted by Metanomics as part of their weekly broadcast series held in Second Life.
First, O'Driscoll offers a teaser of the upcoming conference, noting that the conference will be very case-study focused and that the second 3D TLC is still looking for "ideas, concepts and case studies." He also said that he's looking to install a virtual component to the program, "maybe a more 3D virtual component to the Conference." O'Driscoll also offered some brief notes on his book coming out in 2010, Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration.
Following this, Margaret Regan sat down with Bloomfield to discuss how virtual reality experiences will blend into the what the Future Work Institute sees as the future of work: a mixture of work in-office, at-home, and at-a-third-location (all quotes from the transcript):
"The virtual reality experiences that we’re going to talk about today will be integrated into this real life so people will attend meetings, participate in business-learning simulations," she said."They’ll travel to distant places, and they’ll create their digital clones or avatars, but they won’t be necessarily physically going anyplace."
Regan then goes on at length to discuss some pretty interesting things about how virtual worlds are affecting diversity in the workplace. Towards the end of the interview, Regan discusses the nuts and bolts of one corporate experience she had introducing people to Unisfair, ProtoSphere and Second Life.
"This year, as most of my clients did, they had to cancel because of the cost of bringing all those people together, but they said to me, “This is such an important event for us. We have to find another way to do it.” So we introduced them, not to Second Life, by the way; they asked us, “Can we all meet in Second Life?” They wanted to bring a thousand people in, who had never been there before, for this meeting. And, because I know all these different Worlds, I said, “Not yet. You’re not ready for that. You’re just graduating from WebEx. And, if you want to go the next step from WebEx, go to another platform.” So we used Unisfair. And Unisfair, different from the other Worlds, is web-based. They think that they have avatars. And when you look at the visual of Unisfair, there are actually no avatars there, but all my clients think they’re avatars. They’re actually shadow people, but they really think they’re avatars. And that’s fine because it at least feels like a Virtual World.
"There you do an approach that’s called video/audio SimuLive so you can record part of it, and then you go live, talking to thousands of participants, and you hope the technology works and luckily it did for us. The good part of that is, you can do a whole event, as we did. We did a global inclusion summit, with people from four or five different continents. We had close to a thousand people there in one day. And it’s now up on demand for fifteen hundred people a day can come in and have that same experience so it makes it very cost-effective.
"What they experience when they go in is, they come into the main hall. I appear. I actually just kind of come out of nowhere, and I appear, not as an avatar, but as myself walking on the path of this Virtual World. I welcome them, and then I disintegrate. I disappear. They go into the conference center. They hear their executive’s speech. We have panels from all over the world. They go into exhibit halls. We had interactive theater, which we recorded beforehand. They all go into a networking lounge, and then they can collect documents for the resource center. That’s what we called stage one.
"We had a very successful event, and it was Sodexho, and it was Microsoft people who came in. We had a great learning from that event, which was--we had all kinds of topics set up in the networking lounge so people could talk about all these diversity topics. All anyone wanted to do was stand in the lounge, find their friends, talk in many different languages about what a cool thing this was, how they could use it, wasn’t this great and basically just do a lot of social networking."
Regan then discussed ProtoSphere, a virtual world designed for enterprise, in a little more depth.
"ProtoSphere is our second level. It is designed for an enterprise. It’s secure. You do have avatars. They’re much easier to manipulate. It has [voice chat and text?] chat. You can share applications. We have a generational training simulation in there. And there people can have their own spaces to collaborate, to work. There’s a Wikipedia. We have a client who’s using this to bring in all their [MBAs?] from different parts of the world and to onboard them into the company. And that is very successful, and that is what we suggest if people do not want an open World like Second Life, but they want their own secure World."
You can view the show here or read the full transcript here on SlideShare.
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