virtual worlds

short summary of the presentation someone from  riversrunred made:

• creating collaboration,
• design your communication environment
• think as vw as networks --> this is the added value
• go in slowly, understand it, casy study yourself
• control your brand

I just had an interesting session about the integration of mobile devices in virtual worlds.

Have a look at vodafone in SL. There you can take a mobile and phone and send SMS into real world and vice versa.

ironstar from Helsinki created MoiPal, something like a tamagocchi for playing in virtual worlds. Target group are kids.

Nice idea

conclusion first day:

virtual worlds will change our way of communication and work

• virtual worlds are mainly used for social interaction
• need of interfaces, standards to integrate business applications, secure payment systems and mobile devices
• universal avatars would be great
• tendency to closed worlds for communication networks in companies, open source solutions are preferred
• additional marketing tool for companies
• people use their avatars as a toy
• an avatar is always a substitute of the real human being behind and shows - wanted or not - wishes and unconscious behaviour

All in all a confirmation what I already know, but not to bad.

social impacts:
social networking, flatter hierarchies, self organized critically

--> changing the structure of work, changes roles
--> use of virtual spaces and social communities
--> are we able to do use these tools?

politic-economic impacts:
globalisation
global law and economy vs. national law and economy

--> global communities

technological impacts:

--> immersive worlds
--> easy accessability and interoperability

virtual worlds are an additional tool for education and vocational training:
cross agencies trainings, in-world simulations are gesteuert bei real people = create real experience -->

augemented reality / immersive worlds
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/eli_outcomes.htm

so less time:

http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/info/categories.shtml

In between we have a discussion about different virtual worlds and how they change our behaviour, social interaction and work.

Dele Atanda from DIAGEO talks about how his company bring people from the global marketing devision together and gets them excited to the new digital strategy of the company by joining Second Life.

Played around with collaboration tools (wikis, blog, rss,. podcasts, brain storming tools...) and tried to integrate them into virtual world.

Had big challenges by take care of security issues.

Basics issues:
Had lot's of session with all staff members to get them familiar with SL and additional to that also create them personal blogs (set up an competition ), implemented wikis to work on projects.

Created real looking avatars, named them with their real names, costumized meeting and presentation rooms (4 around the world) with different ambiance according the local cultural aspects.

Are going to create an brainstorming area: type in ideas, as much people click on it, is bigger appears the bubble with this idea

All notes in the rooms were recorded and automatical transfered into the company wiki and blogs.

An training and team building was done on the way, formal and informal.

Key benefits:

• greater engagement and social interaction
• potential travel & carbon reduction
• new creativity and ways of work
• immersive knowledge bank
• enthused teamsbetter connected people
• The biggest challenge and the biggest part of this project was change management and NOT the software or virtual environment!

Working meeting are announced usually 15 minutes in advance and all people join and stay there after the meeting and share ideas. It is sustainable if a calendar of ongoing activities is created and offer different possibilities for teams to be involved and entertained.

Duration: 8 weeks
Age of employees: youngest 18, oldest 59.
Costs so far were nearly 100 T€

Future:
for securitiy reasons wish to privatise this environment, probably with an open source variant of SL

I am just arrived and Steve Prentice is talking about the topic above.

His points to think about before start an investment:

• Do not go in because everyone else is doing that
• a lot of closed vw, especially in US are big social networks, with strict rules, cooperation projects, meeting points - this is immersive in ususal TV behaviour
• have a clear plan how to use this media
• be aware of the type of participants
• play the game to get in contact with participants
• integrate the vw into your marketing tools
• to whom belongs the things you create in vw
• who controlls the data?

It's a long haul!

It's all about community and collaboration -build your own intranet!

Look for open source solution to do that.

I am going to attend the Virtual Worlds Forum for the next two days.

Tomorrow, on the workshop day I hope to get an overview about what enterprises can do in virtual worlds (conferences, access, tools, security issues, access controlling,...) even though I know a bit of all from our own projects in Second life. The real conference starts on Wednesday where I am especially interested in to get some information about further development of interfaces for business applications, SSL including, transferable avatars,...

I'll blog about during the days, free WLAN is available