Virtual working

Some interesting ideas and developments are noted at the UNI Communicators' Forum, concerning virtual computer worlds and work.

A summary is as follows:

Virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com, and more business-focused offerings are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools.

Major companies and public-sector organizations — such as BP, IBM, Intel, and the US Army — are investing heavily in virtual world technologies.

But it’s still early, pioneering days.

You’ve practically got to be a gamer to use most of these tools — setup can be arduous, navigating in a 3-D environment takes practice, and processing and bandwidth requirements remain high.

But within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today.

Information and knowledge management professionals should begin to investigate and experiment with virtual worlds.

Forrester have identified 4 main scenarios for work applications:

* Saving on travel costs for meetings and networking - link up more people than possible before, and for less money
* Saving on buying expensive machinery for training - use a simulator instead, and keep the costly kit for the trained practitioners
* Replicating the experience of working with other - particularly good for teleworkers, including training
* Role playing exercises - especially on disaster management issues that you really wouldn’t want to try recreating in real life.

I personally don't see what's wrong with first life in these situations!

If you are rich/stupid (or both) you can get more details of the report from Forrester here.

Cheers John for this one.