Virtual Worlds Will Soon Be as Important as Web
Companies
Computerworld (01/09/08) Havernstein, Heather
"A Forrester Research report argues that within five years the 3D Internet will become as important to companies as the Web is today. The report,"Getting Work Done in Virtual Worlds," concludes that executives should begin investigating and experimenting with virtual worlds because of their promise for remote collaboration, training, and building and sharing 3D models. The report says that modern collaboration tools are far less
beneficial to companies. For example, the inability to see gestures during teleconferences causes problems for some attendees. It would be easy to tell who was speaking during a virtual world meeting, and avatars can even be directed to express gestures and emotions. "In a virtual meeting room,you can see who is present, and more importantly, who is multi-tasking, who has raised a hand or who has been away from their keyboard so long that their avatar has fallen asleep," the report says. Virtual meetings could be particularly important for professionals such as surgeons, architects,engineers, and product designers, who use CAD or visualization systems to
create projects, which could be imported to the virtual meeting and viewed first hand by everyone involved. Princeton University has a project to manage distributed teams working on a large-scale astrophysics project, the University of Maryland worked with the I-95 Corridor Coalition to build a virtual world simulation of highway emergencies, and Duke University and Virtual Heroes are collaborating to create a high-fidelity 3D virtual environment to help train health care professionals in teamwork and
communication skills."
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