Feature: Exploring virtual worlds

Three-dimensional virtual worlds are no longer merely a pastime. Businesses are investing time and resource in building an online presence in environments such as Second Life. Lee Hopkins explores some examples.

The true three-dimensional (3D) world is a fully-immersive one; the user can walk and sometimes fly around it, create 3D objects and interact with those objects in ways that simulate the ‘real world’ laws of physics.
Some of these worlds are designed for children and teenagers, some for adults, and some for both.

Second Life
Arguably the most well-known of these 3D worlds is Second Life – and it is certainly the virtual world that business has experimented with the most (although many corporations are also investigating other virtual reality environments). Virtual worlds analyst KZero (http://www.kzero.co.uk) is currently tracking 170 brands across many different industries in Second Life, including: Adidas, Dell, IBM, Calvin Klein, Toyota, Coca Cola, Kraft, Wella, Ben & Jerry’s, ABN Amro, Vodafone, Mercedes Benz, Colgate, and Save the Children.

Case study one: Accenture’s island
The uses to which businesses have put Second Life are varied. For example, global management consultancy Accenture has built its own island, which is used for recruitment purposes.
According to analyst Gary Hayes (http://personalizemedia.com), Accenture’s investment in the island was returned after six recruitment fairs. Accenture carries out recruitment activities in 49 countries, therefore, by using one recruitment-oriented island – rather than each territory, country or region building their own – the savings quickly start to mount up. The global recruitment marketing team at Accenture holds meetings, calls and tours with recruiters from around the globe, and has even created a guide on how to sign up for a Second Life account, walk, sit and engage with others.

Case study two: Second Life Association of Certified Public Accountants
A collective of North American Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) uses its island as an information resource for the general public. More importantly, it runs regular training and information sessions for its members; and separate information evenings and informal social events.

Case study three: CPA Australia
CPA Australia introduced its membership to Second Life and is working within a virtual world from within Second Life – at its own custom-built location. Lindy McKeown1 and I presented at its 2008 National Congress which was being run in Melbourne. But rather than travel to Melbourne, Lindy presented from her office in Brisbane and I from my office in Adelaide.
Helen Mitchell, CPA Australia’s director of Knowledge Networks reported on her blog that:

“Feedback to date shows they valued the event, content and experience – we had them logging in from all over Australia and the world, including the UK and USA. Broadband and other technicalities aside, they all experienced the same environment, no matter where they were logging in from.
“And it was in real-time, 3D, where each person’s avatar provided a visual and spatial indication of them as a person; and the event as an occasion, where interaction and Q&A were a natural part of proceedings. A much richer experience than if this was a webinar, videoconference or video recording of a session.”

But it is not just industry bodies that are using Second Life and virtual worlds for meetings. The following is a list of corporate bodies that are getting involved:

BP’s chief technology office team has experimented with virtual worlds in a number of scenarios from IT strategy planning, training, collaboration, online events and consumer education;
Recruitment marketing solution provider SmashFly Technologies has opened an office in Second Life for its distributed workforce;
New Business Horizons is opening a new office for the Institute of Travel Management in Second Life as a way to cut down on the need to travel for conferences;
Johnson + Johnson uses virtual worlds to recruit globally, just as Accenture does;
So too does KPMG;
Cisco Systems uses Second Life for developing its sales force;
IBM is heavily invested in 3D virtual worlds, including not only its own home-spun experiments, but also in Second Life; and,
The Gizzard Communications Group runs meetings and conferences in Second Life on fundraising for not-for-profit organisations.

IBM and Linden Lab, the owners of the Second Life platform, recently released a case study2 in which IBM estimates that by using Second Life for two of its major events, it saved over US$320,000. “With an initial investment of roughly US$80,000, IBM estimates that it saved over US$250,000 in travel and venue costs and more than US$150,000 in additional productivity gains (since participants were already at their computers and could dive back into work immediately) for a total of US$320,000 saved (when compared to the potential expense if the event had been held in the physical world),” the report said.

Educational uses of Second Life
Many educational establishments use Second Life for both research and long-distance education purposes.
The University of South Australia’s School of Communication, for example, runs some of its courses in Second Life, enabling students to investigate the nuances of communication in a 3D virtual world.
The prestigious Harvard Law School was the first top tertiary institution to move into Second Life, running a module on ‘law within the virtual environment’. There was no ‘real-world’ way to take the course – all students had to take the module from within Second Life.
In the UK, Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) has brought in part of the university’s honours-level ‘Film and Media’ undergraduate degree to Second Life. Even though most of the class will be virtual, MMU is interested specifically in Second Life as a tool for training, including a game based around film editing, practical skills and simulation. “The course is the first to be delivered almost entirely in Second Life,” Paul Booth, senior lecturer in film and media at MMU said in a statement. “The media collaboration syllabus is designed to be contained within the virtual world; all exercises use a combination of real-world skills, and in-world production and distribution. Only two lectures will be delivered in a real-world classroom as an introduction to Second Life and new media technology.”
Third-year medical students at Imperial College, London, have found that Second Life provides a useful supplement to their normal studies. As part of a pilot test, students walk through the ins and outs of a realistic hospital – washing hands, diagnosing patients, ordering X-rays and more. And while they have noted that it’s not as helpful as actually walking around the hospital’s halls, they’re finding – as paramedic students at St George’s, University of London and Kingston University have similarly – that the 24/7 availability of a virtual world is a convenient way to drive home other lessons. According to Maria Toro-Troconis, a senior learning technologist at Imperial College London, “The aim is to develop a more engaging learning environment, rather than just replicate what you have in real life. Game-based learning plays a very important role.”
In the US, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Iowa State University and Wright State University have partnered to teach over 100 part-time MBA students many key computing concepts based around IBM’s ‘Power Systems’ and infrastructure. Over five weeks, pairs of students spent about four hours per week in Second Life, researching server issues and IBM solutions to prepare for a Second Life-based presentation. The goal, noted Dr. Keng Siau, Professor of Management Information Systems (MIS) for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was to keep business managers and executives abreast of technology (both IBM’s and Second Life’s), but also to use the virtual world to cement the lessons learned. “The process of doing the project is more important than the output,” Dr. Siau reported on Chris Maxcer’s SystemiNetwork blog. “By going through these phases of understanding, researching on the web and discussing with their partners... I bet that after five weeks, they’ll remember this for the rest of their lives – it’s not just another guest lecture for three hours.”
The Nature Publishing Group (a division of Macmillan) uses its group of Second Life ‘iSecond Lifeands’ to host an educational game tribute to Charles Darwin. “ ‘Notes from the Voyage’ is an interactive game that promotes engagement and knowledge,” explains Kristen French, Nature’s head of community business development.
North Carolina State University received a US$400,000 award from the Ernst & Young Foundation to continue with the development of its distance learning programs within Second Life, particularly with regard to the department of accounting in the College of Management.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has run an exhibit in Second Life. The exhibit was inspired by a separate effort that asked a group of high-school students to conceive an interactive space around the Holocaust. The students produced a design document that has been brought to life. Users take the role of a journalist – investigating what happened on the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ (also known as Kristallnacht), listening to testimony from Holocaust survivors and examining artefacts in a ransacked section of a city. “I wanted something which gives visitors a reason for them to engage, not necessarily that they were a part of the history, but they have a reason to be there,” said David Klevan, education manager for technology and distance learning initiatives at the Museum. “I wanted visitors to be asking questions as they went through.”
The Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Partnership Foundation and the University of Texas are working together on the Carter Academic Service Entrepreneur (CASE) grant programme for virtual worlds. It’s Second Life-focused, asking students to use the virtual world to serve real-world communities. One example given is using it to tutor local high-school students. The CASE grant offers US$1,000 to support the project and a US$500 scholarship at its completion. “Our CASE grant model has proven extremely successful offline. This project will be a demonstration that community service can be a new horizon for online virtual worlds,” said foundation president Sue Sehgal.
The University of Houston Department of Health and Human Performance has moved the class on public health issues in physical activity and obesity into Second Life. “In discussions on how obesity impacts the heart, I can make a 3D model of a healthy heart and a diseased heart, and allow the students to view the inside of the left ventricle to demonstrate how blood flow is altered by disease,” said Brian McFarlin, assistant professor of health and human performance. “I want to be mindful of what students want. It’s about them and trying to give them a better learning experience.”
San Antonio College’s writing centre has recently launched itself into Second Life to provide new tutoring options.
Social scientists around the world are using Second Life as a platform and environment from which they can monitor and map human interaction and learning, and identity formation and maintenance.
Librarians across many campuses regularly meet in Second Life to swap ideas, share tips and see what benefits virtual worlds can offer their institutions, their academics, their students and themselves.

Technical complexity of Second Life
Second Life enables anyone to present PowerPoint-style slideshows, play movies and soundtracks, speak ‘live’ to their audience and colleagues, and offer information and additional resources to visitors, either in-world or via links that open up web pages in the visitor’s web browser.
Of course, Second Life is not just for business use. Shopping for digital goods is by far the biggest activity in-world, with everything from shoes, underwear, suits, shirts, dresses and bikinis for sale, alongside furniture, houses, animals, plants and additional animations for your avatar (your in-world representation of yourself).
You can buy different hairstyles and even different bodies if you don’t like the one you are given when you sign up.

Welcome to the dark side of Second Life’s sweet shop, Luke
Just as in ‘real life’, there is a darker side to Second Life, too. These are designated areas where sex services are for sale, and there is no shortage of shops that sell clothing, body parts and avatar animations of a strictly R-rated nature.
But despite the occasional mainstream media exposure about this dark side, the vast majority of Second Life is safe from such activity.
Much like a child in a sweet shop, many new residents of adult worlds like Second Life gorge on the sweet stuff until they are full, but that full feeling doesn’t take long to reach.
Most new residents visit one or two sex-themed areas – usually just to see what the fuss is all about – and then go off in search of other entertainment. This includes searching for friends, companies they have heard are in Second Life and themed regions that have received mainstream press attention, such as goth-themed worlds, worlds of furry animals, battle war zones, replicas of real-world areas such as Amsterdam, and so on.

Rules of behaviour
Many companies that use virtual worlds such as Second Life for their business meetings provide their employees with guidelines or rules of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in these and other social media environments.
Such policies can include elements that remind employees that, at all times, they represent their employer, and therefore, they must not act in any way that could bring the company into disrepute. In other words, the same behaviours that are expected in the ‘real world’ are also expected in the virtual space.
Some companies also use open-source software, such as OpenSim (http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page ) and Project Wonderland on their own servers behind the firewall, thereby ensuring the ‘integrity’ of the environment.
Others give their employees permission to visit any area, as long as their avatar does not, in any way, suggest links back to the employer. While this can leave an employer open to the risk of an employee accessing an area that might cause offence if seen by another employee, most employees are sensible enough not to put their access to Second Life or the internet at risk.
Microsoft reportedly has an effective informal policy regarding blogging and other social media activity – “don’t do something stupid that will lose you your job”. Wise advice, indeed.
As with social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, some companies believe that providing access to virtual world’s like Second Life will only result in lost productivity as the employee ‘runs amok’ and wastes all of his/her time running down endless virtual rabbit holes. However, this reflects a general distrust of employees and is a damning reflection of the company’s culture.
If the company so distrusts its employees to ‘do the right thing’ that it gives them only partial access to the tools required by today’s knowledge workers to do their job, then no amount of ‘employees are our greatest asset’ rhetoric from the senior management team will convince employees to give any trust or loyalty to the company.
But the company that shows respect to its employees, that recognises in them a fundamental curiosity and interest in exploring novelties to assess their utility, and that enables employees the freedom to explore and play (because it is through play that we most quickly and profitably learn), is more likely to reap greater rewards from its employees.
These rewards include faster take-up of new working practices, faster adoption of new workplace cultures, quicker returns on the investment in infrastructure and training, and improved productivity and increased collegiality.
Studies show that the increased collegiality that comes from adoption of social media tools and social networking strategies in the workplace brings with it increased loyalty, lower turnover and increased productivity. Not a bad outcome.
Much like YouTube and Facebook, virtual worlds offer tremendous networking and learning opportunities – not just funny videos, inane self-congratulation or invitations to be a vampire. Project managers are showing their clients what a new, yet-to-be-built customised component can look like. Clients can walk around it or interact with it, and see how it fits in with their current office decor or plant machinery.
Training institutions are using virtual worlds to train emergency department nurses in how to use new equipment by letting them ‘play’ with the various controls and see what effects they have on patient welfare and the other elements of patient management.
There are over 250 virtual worlds already in existence or in development; naturally there will be a shake-out and consolidation of worlds over time, but just as there are hundreds of thousands of traditional websites that generate real-world returns on investment for their owners amongst the millions of websites around, so too will hundreds of virtual worlds serve us in similar ways.

This article is adapted from an excerpt of Ark Group’s new report, Social Media: The new Business Communication Landscape, by Lee Hopkins. For more information contact Robyn Macé at: rmace@ark-group.com.

Lee Hopkins is a management psychologist and business communicator. He can be contacted through his website at http://leehopkins.net/.

References

Can be found at: http://lindymckeown.com/
Can be found at: http://secondlifegrid.net.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/Second_Life_Case_IBM.pdf