Virtual Worlds for Business

After a few tries with Second Life I was unable to make virtual worlds work for remote business meetings. It is a nice concept, but there just was no substantial benefit to using a virtual world versus the usual screen sharing approaches. It is true that you could build some excitement with people that were already using virtual worlds. But you also have to have all the people that have never used a virtual world trained. In most companies that's a pretty large percentage. These methods have to be very transparent or very valuable beyond the usual conferencing methods to make them work. They also have to include real interaction beyond audio and text. I read the two white papers linked to below:

' ... Clever Zebra has just released two Virtual Worlds white papers in conjunction with the sold-out July vBusiness Expo. The goal of these papers is to give businesses interested in virtual worlds a clear and simple guide to taking first steps in this new technology, and to remove some of the awful complexity involved ... '

These papers are good, there was nothing I disagreed with. They are worth reading. It still does not alter my three objections: 1.) there is no critical mass of virtual world fluent people in business today. 2.) Virtual Worlds like SL can be unstable, thus unreliable for important meetings. 3.) There is no great difference between virtual world interaction and good screen-share plus conference call systems, which also save travel. Beyond the initial novelty I don't see avatars having much social effect.

This is my view on current systems. My experience is mainly with SL. I do hope virtual world systems evolve to become something really worth while. It's not ready yet.