Endless Knots

The hazards of Second Life

BusinessWeek.com has a good roundup - "The (Virtual) Global Office" - of company efforts to use Second Life (the virtual world where you too can be two people or three...) by Rachael King: They hold meetings that are simultaneously face-to-face and virtual, they recruit new talent, they collaborate, and sometimes things get out of hand:

Cisco is among companies that recruit in Second Life. "My extended team uses Second Life primarily to recruit new talent," says Andrew Sage, a marketing vice-president at Cisco, adding that Second Life is good for finding workers under the age of 25. Yet even for an executive as tech-savvy as Sage, using an avatar in Second Life can be challenging. Early on, during a recruitment seminar for resellers, Sage accidentally caused his avatar to fly away while making a presentation. "Needless to say, it wasn't ideal," Sage says.

I hope he made it back to terra firma, so to speak.

"Mixed reality" for virtual teams

Techie alert: Sun has announced something very interesting in the virtual reality space.

Non-techie alert: A computer company has come up with a truly innovative way for people to meet online.

Our friends at Leading Virtually, the new blog out of SUNY Binghamton, are directing us to a great little movie from Sun that shows their new collaborative work environment called MPK20. Apart from the name reminding us of 3PKO, THIS IS REALLY COOL!

As Rebecca Jestice points out on her post, most online "virtual environments" duplicate the real world. Same old, same old, as usual with technology innovations--the horseless carriage, i.e., whereby the next thing mimics (or is named for) the one that preceded it.

Thus, most of the efforts to create online collaborative environments begin with building replicas of existing real-world spaces. A few months ago, we saw a Second Life facsimile of the building, floor, and room we were standing in to watch that company's virtual collaboration space demo.

Sun has broken the mold with MPK20 (OK, it's named for their canny building-naming system: they have 19 buildings on their Menlo ParK campus, which makes this the 20th). It doesn't look like a Sun building (at least not the ones I've been in); it integrates real-world collaboration with its virtual offspring; and it even has a playroom (well, it's a music library, but still...).

Sounds nutty, especially if you're new to this stuff. Take a look and tell me if you don't think this is a breakthrough. What got me was that avatars (keen readers, remember Cracking the code on virtual DNA a couple of days ago) can enter virtual team rooms that include screens where real meetings are projected via video hook-up. That's different.

Which is why Nicole Yankelovich, Sun's principal investigator for Project Wonderland, as the effort is known, describes it as "mixed reality"  (ComputerWorld, Feb 11, 2007).