After an impressive presentation at the Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 convention in San Jose, Christian Renaud, Cisco Technology Center's Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments, has made a daring proposal about mirror meetings.
"For the remainder of the year, don't fly. Neither will I. Instead, we will use the amazing array of tools at our disposal, from Telepresence to WebEx to avatar-mediated communications, to approximate the magic of physical proximity."
If he suddenly has to go back on his pledge, this Cisco enthusiast for Virtual Worlds vows to pay $1000 to support the work of the Nature Conservancy to help offset carbon emissions. Christian is one of a number of business leaders using virtual worlds who is confidently making the claim that they can reduce air travel and substitute real-life meetings with virtual communication, and add much other value besides.
Hamlet Au, famous blogger about Virtual Worlds who was formerly embedded in Second Life, says he is off to London for another Virtual Worlds meeting, and comments, "I never traveled the real world as much, until I started working in a virtual one." While it seems counterintuitive at one level, the furious conferencing and deal-making around virtuality and the future 3-D web need face-to-face meetings where anonymous avatars can meet each other and come to trust each other at a higher meat-world level. After they've had a chance to do so, *that* is when they may start to save on airfare.
While nearly everyone at the keynote speech at Virtual Worlds '07 raised their hand when asked if they had an avatar, many business people almost pride themselves on not getting too immersed, having characters that never change their clothes, or were customized and prepared for them by other people, and going AFK in a world and tabbing out of it to work in other applications. They might drop into a seminar, but aren't going to fly around a dance club feeling ridiculous. Or will they?
Actual measurement and analysis of the effectiveness of communication and the level of work productivity in virtual worlds have not really been attempted -- yet. One IBM analyst told me that he did not believe IBM should leave its ingrained telephone culture, where people spontaneously pick up the phone to talk to their colleagues even in the same building. Other IBM staffers swear by the sense of proximity they get from meeting their colleagues from around the world in a close, interactive space.
The obstacles of lag and the learning curve, as well as the disruptiveness of private IMs are at one end of the spectrum of considerations about business use of virtual worlds. At the other end are the amazingly accelerated and intuitive communications even with typing; the quick, interactive prototyping; the storage of data accessible by a group asynchronously;, and serendipity -- spontaneous connections and ideas coming together constantly. It will likely take some time and study to harness the best parts of virtual worlds and walk around the annoyances -- or fly!
