Driving Value with the Metaverse in the Enterprise

Irving talks some of the work that IBM did with the Virtual World  'Second Life' in the mid 2000's at IBM which we also participated in, a nice look with lots of interesting links.  This also fills me in on lots of later work, such as metaverse located meetings and task interactions.  Could not get our folks interested  Much of that was documented in this blog.  Is the addition can AI 'Enhancement' enough to make the proposition much more interesting?  Will search, examine these for later comment.

A collection of observations, news and resources on the changing nature of innovation, technology, leadership, and other subjects      By Irving Wladawsky-Berger 

Driving Value with the Metaverse in the Enterprise     (much more at the link)

A killer app is an IT application whose value to individuals and companies is relatively simple to explain, its use is fairly intuitive, and the application turns out to be so useful that it can singlehandedly propel the success of a new product or service. Word processing and spreadsheets, for example, were major factors in the widespread adoption of personal computers in the 1980s.

I got interested in 3D immersive environments in the mid-2000s when IBM launched an exploratory initiative on the topic. As part of these efforts, we conducted a number of experiments on Second Life, a platform that allowed its users to develop a variety of virtual world applications. We built a number of workplace applications, including virtual meetings, and online events, and even built a virtual replica of Beijing’s Forbidden City in partnership with the Palace Museum that was opened to the public. But, despite our high expectations, we couldn’t find any compelling enterprise killer apps, and after about three years, the project was dissolved. In the ensuing years, 3D immersive technologies and applications continued to advance, but mostly focused on video-games and related industries.

The past few years have seen a surge of interest in the metaverse and extended reality. “After desktop computing, the consumer internet and the smartphone boom, the consumer-computing industry is past due its Next Big Thing,” wrote The Economist in  “A reality check for the metaverse is coming,” an article in its 2022 year-end issue. “[A]n internet which is still largely flat — based on two-dimensional text, images and video — is ripe for replacement with one that is three-dimensional and immersive.” ... '