Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Wed 10 Oct 2007 10:40 AM PDT
Cisco Systems doesn't believe business ends at the virtual water's edge.
The San Jose company owns four islands in the virtual online world
Second Life, each populated with pavilions for product demonstrations,
training and meetings.
But its push into virtual work spaces - where offices and conference
rooms exist inside computers instead of concrete - reaches well beyond
Second Life's quirky environment of flying "avatars," or digital people.
The network-equipment maker launched a virtual site for business
partners and service providers a month ago where visitors can wander
among product exhibits. It also set up virtual workrooms where
engineers, represented by avatars, collaborate on new designs, despite
being spread around the world. The company plans to make the virtual
workrooms available to all its employees in 2008.
With its interest in virtual environments, Cisco has placed itself on
the leading edge of a workplace transformation now creeping into U.S.
corporations. The goal is to enhance communications and productivity as
workforces go global - the effect may be a radically different office
of tomorrow.
"This technology is just coming of age," said Christian Renaud, chief
architect of Cisco's networked virtual environments. "It is at a
crossroads. It's either going to get really big or stay boutique."
Advocates say virtual worlds offer new ways for people to collaborate
and foster workplace interaction in an age of dispersed employees. Companies can also save on travel time and cut down on the greenhouse gases fueling global warming. Virtual worlds may take
years to become widely adopted, but interest is growing, said Ian
Hughes, a virtual worlds evangelist at IBM. "Eighteen months ago, they
were (considered) insane. Suddenly they are becoming very real."
Skeptics say serious problems regarding security and the ability of
virtual worlds to interact with each other remain unsolved. Workers may
also need powerful new computers to run the 3-D environments that make
virtual conference rooms seem more like the real thing.
Most corporations have yet to take the first few steps. Even consumer
sites such as Second Life that have attracted a lot of press attention
see relatively low traffic. According to comScore Media Metrix, a
research firm, the Web destination attracted just 340,000 unique
visitors from the United States in August, a relatively small number
compared with other big-name Internet sites.
Some companies admit they have yet to give virtual worlds much thought.
Other firms are moving aggressively. One is IBM, which has a variety of
experimental projects under way that let employees hold meetings in
virtual office buildings with waterfalls and have chats around
impromptu campfires. Participants select from a variety of relatively
plain avatars linked to their IBM names - unlike Second Life where members can embellish their avatars.
"In virtual worlds, we notice people mingle like they do in real life,"
said Hughes. "The pre-event mingle gets to be very important."
Sun Microsystems has a project it began in January entitled MPK20, a
name that refers to the first virtual building. It's an addition to 19
real buildings at Sun's Menlo Park campus. MPK20 has about seven rooms
and is being used by its developers for team meetings. Other small
groups will be invited starting in November.
In the "team room," workers post documents they are working on and can
speak to one another. Nicole Yankelovich, principal investigator, said
the benefit is the serendipitous social interaction employees in
different locations can share. On any given day, more than 50 percent
of Sun's personnel work remotely, and employees say they miss
person-to-person exchange, Yankelovich said. After virtual meetings,
small groups form spontaneously to continue discussions.
"To me, that's what we designed MPK20 for," Yankelovich said. "That is something you cannot do with video conferencing."
Vendors of virtual world software and services are convinced a large market is inevitable. Forterra Systems of
San Mateo began shipping its virtual-worlds software in May and says it
has 20 customers, including the U.S. Army, which uses a virtual
environment to train recruits on checkpoint procedures they will
encounter in Iraq. Qwaq of Palo Alto has "scores" of customers for the
virtual-world hosting service it has had in the market for less than a
year, said Chief Executive Greg Nuyens. Among them is Intel.
"This isn't really a market yet," Erica Driver, a principal analyst at
Forrester Research, said of virtual worlds products for businesses.
"It's still experimentation."
And there are good reasons. First, companies need to enhance security
so they can confirm the identities of employees and protect
communications with encryption in case they are intercepted. Worlds
need to be interoperable, so that employees moving from one to another
don't need to log out and log in again with new personas.
Computers also may need to be more powerful. During a presentation last
month, Intel senior fellow Justin Rattner estimated that a virtual, 3-D
environment could require a 100-fold increase in the computational
power of servers and place three times the load on personal computer
chips.
They are "very computationally intensive on the client as well as the server," Rattner said.
Mercury News.com
Contact Mark Boslet at mboslet@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5425.
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