Real Business Meetings in 3D Virtual Worlds Won't Go Mainstream For Many Years, Platform Evangelist Predicts

Real world businesses won't widely use virtual worlds like Second Life to hold meetings for quite some time -- that's the prediction of Erica Driver of ThinkBalm, a consultancy firm which specializes in the use of Second Life and other virtual worlds for business applications. (I wrote about one of their innovative SL applications in 2009.) Only last January, Erica predicted that 2013 was the year when mainstream adoption of virtual meetings would take hold. Now, however, as she tells Roland Legrand of Mixed Realities, she considers the 2013 prediction “a little bit aggressive." Since then, as Erica expands on Think Balm's blog, there's been a number of setbacks for enterprise use of virtual worlds: Oracle stopping financing its Project Wonderland virtual work platform, for instance, and "[k]ey roles on Linden Lab’s enterprise team were folded into the broader organization and several folks on the enterprise team have moved on". In the short term, she argues, businesses will get better results with what she calls “light immersive” platforms which run on the web, that are extremely easy to use, and are scaled to accommodate thousands of simultaneous participants, not dozens or hundreds. She cites three web-based virtual conferencing systems in that regard -- InXpo, ON24, and Unisfair.

I think she's right that mass market adoption of rich 3D virtual worlds for real world work is quite aways off, though I'm skeptical "light immersive" will fare any better. Looking at the Quantcast analyses of InExpo, On24, and Unisfair, they each attract less than 45K unique monthly visitors. Second Life is roughly five times more popular than all three combined. (For that matter, a single real world convention center, San Francisco's Moscone, got 1.1 million visitors in 2007-08 alone.) As I often say, general mass market adoption of Second Life probably has to happen first before general business users will show up in meaningful numbers. Until then, I think the better strategy for companies like Linden Lab and third party vendors is to concentrate on business applications that are showing good, repeatable results now, and that are only achievable on a platform like Second Life, such as architecture and filmmaking.

Comments

[Paisley Beebe]

Hamlet the platform is far too unstable right now for serious RL business to do anything in here...if you go to the trouble of organising an expo or even a meeting and you have no voice..the speaker or participants crash constantly you would use it once and quit! It would be the same outcome with Architecture and filming. The only reason I persevere in filming 3 TV shows per week in SL is because I can't do it anywhere else like we do! if I had a choice...We have had weeks and weeks of crashes lately through internet and through the viewer and loses of voice through the viewer and internet, and server asset problems. We can't hold voice meetings in our office right now, because for some reason voice can't be activated on our mainland plot, and I cannot be bothered to contact L.L to fix it because I know how long that will take...I have other things to do. Its just not viable. We use Skype because it is 90.99% more reliable than voice, If you have a business here in SL how many times have meetings had to be done some other way or cancelled due to all these issues?...and we are used to it!
Paisley

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

I've argued that serious users in the business world who need immersive content would gravitate to something like ProtoSphere...http://protonmedia.com/

It's Windows only, but that's not an impediment in the corporate world. It also comes without SL's bad rep.

Boring to me? Yes. But if I were an I.T. consultant, I'd recommend it over the LL enterprise product.

Their marketing pitch says it better than I could:

What is the difference between ProtoSphere and Second Life?
 ProtoSphere is a 3D immersive environment built on the Microsoft stack to address business collaboration needs. SecondLife is a business to consumer 3D online service built on open-source technologies and focused on e-commerce, entertainment and third party development.

[ArminasX Saiman]

I have to agree with this assessment, and suggest it may still be too optimistic. In large companies, there are tons of older folks who have no idea what a blog is, let alone a 3D world they would instantly recognize as "cartoons". Believe it or not, these people are still moving into the early 2000's-levels of technology and there's a very long way to go. But it will happen, eventually.

[Loraan Fierrens]

Hmm... I've yet to see a tool that will do the job for businesses. That was actually the reason I started tinkering with Second Life in the first place. I spend my day on the phone, in IM, and on LiveMeeting and would love to have something better. Concerning Paisley's comments on stability... the same is true for the more mundane conferencing tools my company uses. Almost every day, I'm in a teleconference where something goes wrong for someone with the phone or the conferencing software... but we stick with it for reasons that are beyond me. Maybe it's stubbornness, maybe it's masochism.

I hope some people post some other suggestions for tools to consider. It's a real problem for us. How do we effectively share ideas when we're so spread out? How can we stop wasting time struggling with tools and keep people engaged?

By the way, LittleLostLinden, concerning the camping issue... or rather a larger issue I see in a lot of SL discussions. You say you put up with camping and other SL issues day in and day out. Why? If it's so bad that you have to pepper all the comment threads with this topic (regardless of relevance), why don't you leave? If you aren't getting a decent return on your business because of these problems, why don't you pull out and do something else? Throwing good money after bad is just bad business, after all. I don't mean this in a flip or sarcastic way... I'm not trying to troll you here, I'm sincerely interested. I'm fascinated by this class of Second Life user who seem to be bound to the Second Life in some sort of love-hate relationship, and I can't for the life of me figure out why you don't just walk away if it is so terrible.

For myself, I am hardly in Second Life anymore. I'm not mad at the Lindens or anything like that. There wasn't any big issue or bug that made it impossible for me to use. That said, the blush is definitely off the rose: Second Life is just not quite there for me (and not just because I can't use it for business teleconferencing either). I'm still interested in the concept (which is why I follow NWN), and I still pop in from time to time for specific things. I just don't see Second Life getting much beyond what is is today.

[Nexus Burbclave]

@Ignatius, I believe Windows only is more of an impediment than you realize. In first life, I work for a fortune 500 company (which I in no way shape or form speak for :) ). While flavors of windows are in the majority at the company, they do not have the kind of majority that allows our enterprise application developers to ignore OSX or even ubuntu linux. Corporations aren't as married to the beige box as they used to be (mind you, its been years since the beige box was a beige box).

I would actually argue that to make a good corporate system, not only should it be cross platform, it should ideally have good mobile OS support as well.

It would also need scale and security that hasn't really been addressed in the current generation of virtual worlds.

[Ted]

I've stated the same thing when Linden released their 50K commercial behind the firewall (so called solution).

There are plenty of more reliable alternatives that would better assist the corporate or enterprise setting.

Oh, but our service is "green". It will save you so much... yada yada zzzz.

[Gianna Borgnine]

I agree with you Hamlet. I think that we are still a ways away from a mass market adoption of virtual worlds as workplaces. I also don't think that "light immersive" platforms will ultimately be the best meeting spaces due to there lack of realism and engaging atmospheres. Even the IBM folks who simultaneously held conference sessions on multiple platforms found that participants mostly gathered in Second Life to converse and socialize between sessions.

I also agree that there are still viable business applications of SL. Film was a great example. We recently made a sort of commercial for a client using Second Life by creating custom replica(photo-likeness)avatars and sets. It was very cost effective for the company (compared to a traditional commercial) and has been very successful for them. You can see it on their website - http://smartops.com

[Giulio Prisco]

I recommend looking at Teleplace for a virtual workplace platform oriented to business and e-learning. All the necessary tools are built in the platform.

My companies distributes Teleplace and we have several pilots ongoing, with very satisfied users. Also, we are running a beta version of a public access salon, workshop and seminar program based on Teleplace:

http://telexlr8.com/
http://telexlr8.wordpress.com/