Dove Lane

Last week a colleague invited me to make a presentation on virtual worlds to a class at NYU. Having had a major computer melt down only three weeks ago (which accounts for my long silence here), it was a bit of a struggle to get the presentation together. I was to have 45 minutes, which was a large chunk of time for a rather obscure topic. The last time I did a basic introduction presentation, I had 10 minutes, and it focused only on Second Life. This time, I wanted to really do the topic justice and show a lot of pictures from a variety of virtual worlds. I did…89 slides worth!

What was most interesting about the process to me was how my point of view has changed on Second Life. If you look back two years ago, I was skeptical about it and didn’t think it deserved all the hype it was getting. After a year of delving into Second Life and exploring all the variety it has to offer, I can now say without reservation that it is the best virtual world out there for content creators/builders and people who just like to explore. So far, anyway. Yes, there are issues with the SL platform — security, server lag, unexpected down times, a non-intuitive user interface — but it is still the best there is right now, and a rich place to spend time and learn what virtual worlds can offer. There are some exciting new worlds emerging now, and the early views look very promising, even though none of them yet looks like the “killer app” that will turn us all into virtual versions of our physical selves!

The virtual worlds I showed in my presentation were Kaneva, There.com, ActiveWorlds, vSide, World of Warcraft and Webkinz. I didn’t have time to do the visual research on others I like a lot, but that is underway now, and I’ll be completely prepared the next time I’m asked. This was the first time I have ever just lined up all my screenshots back to back and looked at them — and it’s why I decided to write this article. All the avatars and most of the scenery/buildings in most of the worlds are much more simplistic than those in Second Life. It was like the difference between a Mickey Mouse cartoon and the 3D richness offered by characters in City of Heroes. Most of the other worlds are sparse on detail, which reduces the server demands, but makes them much less interesting to look at for long (or after playing Everquest or World of Warcraft for many years!). After looking at the unique and charming appearances of my various avatars in Second Life, it’s really hard to get attached to an avatar in any of these other worlds. Most of them are cartoony and pre-created…the subscriber has little or no ability to customize the appearance details, which matters a great deal to many people like me. At most one can choose darker/lighter skin color, a hair style, and a few basic clothing items.

Second Life has surprised me by being deeply interesting, and engaging my interest on many levels. I do not have a business there, though I have considered making one of some sort. I do own land, a house, various pets and accoutrement, and I manage a sim for a friend. These constitute my personal learning platforms. I learned to use the building tools to create and script objects, to change colors and textures, and to terraform the land. I learned where the truly innovative virtual world creation is happening, and I try to hang out there regularly to absorb the impacts of the many new and creative things I discover there. Plus, I have found several mature, professional groups whose chatter I enjoy seeing scroll by on my screen as I do other things. It has been a wonderful, rich education, even if it has been unstructured. As the saying goes, idle hands will always find something to get into!

The class presentation went well, and many of the members really had their eyes opened and their understanding of the possibilities of virtual worlds stretched. That was satisfying. Mostly, it was just fun for me to be able to introduce people to something that for so many years no one was interested in at all. Ten years ago, when I first proposed a virtual insurance agency in ActiveWorlds using scripted chatbot agents, people’s jaws dropped and they didn’t get it at all. It’s great to be on the leading edge, but it’s really nice when people catch up with you, too.

I just uploaded a long page of KM quotes that I had been accumulating on a community site I manage. I thought it might be helpful for anyone who’s putting together a presentation or doing a cost benefit analysis — or simply wants some inspiration! The link is in the right sidebar under Pages or you can follow this link.

Serendipity is great! Today I had a reason to go back and search for a video I had saved in my favorites on YouTube, and completely by accident I came across a great set of video interviews by Henrik Bennetsen of the Stanford Humanities Lab from the Metaverse U conference at Stanford University last February. You have to tune out all the background noise…the interviews were obviously taped on breaks between sessions…but the content and the insights you can get from the 40+ talks is considerable. All the virtual worlds you’ve heard of, plus some you haven’t, are represented, like Second Life, Multiverse, Wonderland, Metaversum, Ogoglio, BigWorld, Twinity, TomorrowSpace, Transmutable, and Metaplace, as well as Stanford academics who hosted the program and other thought leaders and pioneers, like Jerry Paffendorf, Ren Reynolds, Rob Bloomfield, Mitch Wagner, Daniel Terdiman, Raph Koster, and John Perry Barlow.

The interviewer asks the same four questions of each person, and here is a sampling of the responses. Some discussion threads are clearly starting to emerge.

1. What excites you about current metaverse technology?

“Interaction increasing between virtual worlds and current social networking sites”
“Having a persistent identity that you take with you as a person through all the different technologies and social networks and real places you go…the ability to turn your life into a story.”
“Notion of using metaverse technology to enhance social networking technology–the intersection of the two.”
“How all these technologies will compete and cooperate. How all these rich data streams will be knitted together in the next few years.”
“There is still so much potential! We are just scratching the surface with virtual world technologies.”
“The ability to simulate presence.”
“We are moving to web based platforms, away from a lot of proprietary systems, which will spawn a lot of niche applications that will show us what these platforms are really valuable for.”
“The potential for information manipulation and how we make things intuitive to people.”
“The technology itself is not exciting, it’s more the combination of it with the availability of PCs and broadband networks. It’s available to a wider number of people.”
“The fact that hundreds of thousands of people are out there trading goods and services and seeing how it will ultimately be regulated.”
“The influx of creativity and innovation by participants who are inventing things that haven’t been invented before.”
“The ability to bring a group from around the world together.”
“Connecting humans with humans and seeing how the interact with each other.”
“We are at the beginning of the time when all the bits and pieces are coming together and we are starting to get a road map of where it is all headed.”
“Currently, not as much as what is right around the corner — we are seeing a lot of people bringing the Web to virtual technologies and virtual worlds to the Web.”
“The current Internet is a “go-to” Internet. Virtual worlds bring the content to you, in a way that enhances your everyday experiences.”
“So much interest and so many people thinking about it right now.”
“How quickly we can build tools to create 3D annotations to real world locations.”
“It’s more accessible now, and slowly getting to the masses, rather than remaining just a geek hobby.”

2. What concerns you most about current metaverse technology?

“Nothing really works together right now.”
“Cultural issues…government getting in and taxing virtual goods, etc. I hope it’s later rather than sooner.
“Hype has set the expections of virtual worlds so high that we have to get past that. The limitations of one virtual world don’t mean that the medium is flawed.”
“The digital divide. How rapidly will the technologies be adopted outside the developed world.”
“It could all get killed very young…from the standpoint of legal regulations, real world laws, restrictions and taxes that none of us want to deal with but we all know that they eventually have to be dealt with.”
“Who has access to what sort of data. It will be 100 years before we can sort out the implications to privacy.”
“We are dealing with really fundamental human aspects like body language and friendship, so we have to be careful.”
“Lack of interoperability and standards. People are so excited about it that they aren’t really looking at it objectively. We haven’t found the killer app for virtual worlds yet. Just doing what we already do better is not going to create the metaverse. It’s more than that.”
“Virtual spaces are becoming important to people and the nature of the interactions that are going on means we need to be having discourse in a legal sense about the things we are doing there.”
“We don’t know how to regulate virtual commerce and contracts.”
“It’s still early in the technology maturation cycle, so there are a lot of things that don’t work well, aren’t standardized, etc. I worry about premature closure as a result.”
“Privacy issues.”
“There’s a confusion between the emergence of standards and the effort to create standards. It’s better to have standards emerge from use.”
“A lot of chaos and lack of a road map for where we are headed with metaverse technologies. Other than the simpler tools for kids, it’s a world of painful compromise. Demand is high, but it’s painful for people trying to build the end-user applications.”
“The big iron or development solution is perfectly viable for most solutions. To what degree will we migrate to new technology patterns, given that a lot of the business cases don’t necessarily call for it. To what degree will we break out of established paradigms.”
“There are a lot of unanswered questions. There are social and international implications, cross-cultural barrier, and everyone comes in with certain expectations about what it means. It’s difficult to prioritize what should be solved first.”
“So much in virtual worlds came from the gaming space that we think of virtual worlds as another automonous space. Instead of starting with 3D visualization technology and social spaces and overlaying them over all the people who use the Internet and trying to figure out how they work together, we started from the assumption that we have to go someplace different from our normal work environments.”
“Transparency of personal data.”
“Platforms that are proprietary and not distributed; many are just c**p right now, and even the companies who provide them will say so.”
“Making it more mainstream, so it will compete with TV and radio and other channels.”

3. What will be the most surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?

“Mirror world technologies. When you can lay other kinds of data on top of something like Google Maps and drill down into the life of a real person. Not in a spooky, stalker kind of way!”
“How deeply it will be integrated into our lives and how quickly it becomes so.”
“Privacy…where is the line in the sand between public and private, and how do you stratify the data so that everyone doesn’t have access to all information. How can information be tailored and give the user an element of control.”
“A decade is a long time! How much it’s used in day to day work environments. And how the generation that has grown up with it brings the tools they are used to interacting with daily into the work environment with them. It will be a full scale shift of both the work space and social space.”
“The need for people to be connected at all times will increase. You can see it now in young people who have to be away from their IMs and web browsers. Virtual worlds will tighten the connections between people.”
“How much time we actually spend in virtual worlds and using other kinds of applications.”
“We will find that there are things we can do in those environments that can’t be done in the real environment, once we find the killer app.”
“How ordinary it will become. It’s likely to morph so that being in a virtual environment will be as ordinary as using email. It just won’t matter whether you are in a virtual world or not.”
“Education is a perfect fit for virtual worlds, so this will be a fascinating direction.”
“It will become profoundly ordinary to spend some portion of the day in the metaverse, in the same way we do with the Web now.”
“It will change the classroom and the way we learn completely.”
“How much cool stuff it will do and how much it will tell others. The incentives or convenience tradeoff is going to be a revenue model that will result in loss of privacy.”
“The international societal impact. Taking global, governmental and corporate transactions that are complex, and having them on a person to person basis.”
“Having it pop up in places we don’t expect, like augmented reality, computer aided design, and product design, shopping, etc. The distinction between the virtual and real worlds will become more blurred, and that is where a lot of the real surprises will come from.”
“It will become ubiquitous and everywhere in our daily lives, seamlessly integrated. That would be a pleasant surprise and output of the metaverse concept.”
“It will become a great geographic flattener. We will see a lot more “tribal behavior” with people forming more around communities of interest.”
“A social transformation that leads to a much healthier society that cares for itself and individuals in a much more benign way. I don’t forecast that…it would surprise me.”
“Mobile. Mobile handsets will provide more accessibility. We need tools that can be built into a set of eyeglasses so you can interact with your items in the virtual world or in the real world. Integratable technologies. There are companies moving this direction.”

4. What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?

“That’s hard to say because I’m constantly amazed with the technology and the possibilities.”
“Touch and smell…but perhaps one day we can simulate that, too!”
“Limits of the human brain.”
“I don’t know any. There are some cultural barriers that will keep users from using virtual worlds in really crazy ways, but I don’t know any challenges that can’t be overcome in the next few decades.”
“The ability to catalog/mine/manage/interrogate the huge volume of information to get to context relevant information.”
“Body language. It’s difficult to replicate. The unspoken cues in communication.”
“The scent of smell. A lot of our memories are triggered by smell. It’s subtle. We can simulate tactile, auditory and visual feedback, but not taste and smell.”
“Proprietary software — walled gardens and companies that keep their knowledge to themselves.”
“One of the biggest is that semi-sensory input is still needed. Using things like headsets that are sort of in the real world and sort of in the virtual world is inelegant, and there doesn’t yet seem to be a way to overcome it.”
“Some of the barriers are just differences in experience. There’s not a simple set of norms for what is good and what is not good about virtual worlds, but there will always be a barrier of the need for personal control over our own data.”
“The hardware and connectivity costs. In broad based education and commerce, we need it to be available to people who are economically, physically and geographically disadvantaged.”
“There’s something about being in the live presence of another human being that we will simulate and get closer to, but we will still want to touch live skin from time to time.”
“The subtle person-to-person contact and energy we get when we stand next to each other and share conversation.”
“Privacy in exchange for profit and entertainment.”
“The peace and quiet, the atmosphere offered by the real world.”
“People have to want to use it and deal with the kind of identity and privacy issues it poses. They are endemic to the medium.”
“It will difficult to account for all of the unknowns, and hard to prioritize. Making mistakes is a great way to improve, but it’s easy to get frustrate with failures. There’s a big evolution to occur, and we won’t be able to get around some of the barriers.”
“There’s an evolutionary bias toward building trust from non-verbal behaviors that we have as a species, and there is suspicion that we will lose some of that in virtual worlds. We won’t be able to fake that out with technology, so we will still need the face to face interaction occasionally in order to create the bonds of trust that occur in the real world where the subtle signals can be read.”
“The sensory experience of the real world is approachable, but we will never be able to simulate the true richness of a real world experience.”
“To make it a really natural, organic experience. Without that the uptake will be low and people will not be able to treat it like a natural space.”

Last year I made several presentations to executive groups about Second Life and other virtual worlds. The overwhelming response I had led me to create a workshop comparing the features of many of the current virtual worlds to help business leaders understand their options so they can make solid decisions about what works best for their own organizations and business processes. The people I have talked with are universally fascinated by and intimidated by what a 3D Internet means. They don’t really know what criteria they should use to evaluate the technologies or to gauge the impact on the people in their organizations. Many are not even sure what questions to ask a consultant. Here is a list of things that can help you plan for a 3D future:

How do you plan for it?
When you say “plan”, know whether you mean educate executives, prepare the organization, explore technologies or prioritize implementation features.

How far in advance?
If you’re asking now, the answer is “start now”. As one business leader recently said, now is the time to get into the shallow end of the pool and splash around…while there still is a shallow end!

What are some baby steps to take that still give flexibility if the winds change?

Consider open source platforms

Identify a few work groups or departments that could really benefit from 3D interactions and just offer it to them initially

Identify the business processes that are performing well as they are and don’t make any changes

Don’t spend a lot of money on technologies initially. They are changing rapidly. Spend your money instead to educate and train your people on how to make good use of 3D social interactions.

Answer these key questions:

Purpose

Experience level of users

Who’s behind the initiative/push to do something now?

What are the expected outcomes/results?

What measurements will we use for success?

Other planning considerations:

Existing technology stack

Change management impact

Communications

Social vs. quantitative skills

Security and authentication

Permit remote access?

Mobile devices

Once your key people have discussed these issues, you will probably need a consultant experienced in virtual world options. If you’d like some help identifying the right consultants for your needs, feel free to contact me. I’ll be glad to suggest some names, or help you myself if I can.

There have been some very interesting and erudite discussions recently in the ActKM group which I have, unfortunately, been too busy to participate in. This comment by Neil Olonoff caught my fancy, though, so I decided to blog it. He has written a position paper noting that many recent US government mis-steps have been “knowledge failures,” and he is now searching for a way to establish KM standards to drive success and consistency in the Federal government. He said:

“Tim’s (Kannegieter) analogy to the fire code is a very good starting point. Fire codes are aimed at avoiding having buildings burn down. KM standards should be aimed at … what? Here are a few suggested functional standard areas …

- knowledge sharing across boundaries under certain circumstances to be defined locally
- adherence to good knowledge storage and retrieval practices, to be defined locally
- meeting an acceptable level of learning and skills in knowledge work competencies (according to a common benchmark, like TPFL or similar)
- formulation, vetting, and publishing of best practices
- expertise and personnel location capability
- knowledge retention and sustainment capabilities to ensure transfer of knowledge to successors.”

There are troublesome words in these suggestions that frequently have different meanings to different people (in bold above), not to mention that the term “knowledge” is used when he actually means “information”. I know his suggestions are only ideas at this point, and a lot of wordsmithing would be needed. But just like every other attempted definition of KM I have ever read, these ideas are full of assumptions of a certain point of view…which may or may not be true and/or complete for all organizations or industries.

To me this begs the question of whether there should be KM standards, or actually, whether there ever can be “KM standards.” There is still widespread disagreement about what KM actually is, even though most people now acknowledge it to be a distinctive management discipline. You can only have standards when you can measure. You can only measure when you have a scale against which to measure. At this stage of the evolution of KM as a discipline, establishing standards could actually limit the the creative impetus to explore the breadth of possibilities KM can offer.

Like I have said many times in the past, KM is still like the elephant in the old fable of the blind men and the elephant. Depending upon what an organization’s need is, and upon the skill and understanding of the person leading the KM charge, that elephant can look more like document management or technology or expertise location or a portal or communities of practice. Perhaps standards for each major component of KM are possible, but I don’t think we are at a point where “KM standards” in a universal sense make any sense at all. Let’s not put it into a box before we know how big that box should be.

It’s exciting to be living through the early stages of the development of realistic, interactive virtual worlds and their intersections with real life (what some people call the “meat space”). At this point in time, anything is possible, anyone can participate, and any group or technology can become the dominant force in our virtual future. Things are moving very fast now — too fast for anyone to keep up with everything that is happening and the ideas that are springing up like mushrooms after a rain. That is especially difficult for corporations, governments and other large organizations to deal with, so here is a list of some practical applications that these groups can set their focus on. I’ve distilled it from a number of leading sources that have weight and credibility in the field.

Other possibilities that come to mind include:

Data representation and management reports

Employee background checks

Call center and Help Desk automation

Bio-hazard, weather, chemical and nuclear emergency preparedness simulations

War games and military strategy simulations

If you’d like to suggest others, or tell me about interesting architectures or practical 3D applications you have come across in your own travels, please drop me a note!

For the last six months I have been saturated with virtual world experiences. In addition to more than 20 years of multiplayer gaming as an avatar, I have tried to focus a lot of my time in recent years on other types of virtual world experiences. I have visited There.com, Kaneva, Active Worlds, Second Life, World of Warcraft, Whyville, Yo Ho Ho! Puzzle Pirates, and vSide. Thanks to Metanomics and Life 2.0, I have listened to presentations by the CEOs or CFOs of Second Life, There.com, Kaneva, Forterra, and Whyville, in addition to leading academics and developers in the field — Nick Yee, Raph Koster, Howard Rheingold, Richard Bartle, Edward Castronova, Julian Dibbell, Benn Konsynski, Nicole Yankelovich, Robert Bloomfield, David Wortley, and IBM’s David Levine.

Here is my take on the 11 biggest disappointments participants are finding with virtual worlds today:

Users:
• No start, no finish
• Avatars cannot be moved between worlds
• Lack of facial expressions and body language
• Griefing
• No reputation system

Organizations:

• Unengaged management
• Touch and go companies
• Lack of imagination
• Expecting virtual worlds to become new markets
• Security
• Intellectual property protection

Users

1. No start and no finish. Virtual worlds are not a game. There is no beginning, and no final battle with cinemagraphic cut scene to mark the end of play. World developers need to be more sensitive to how strange the virtual world environments and avatars are to newbies. Not everyone has been a gamer and learned keyboard movement commands. My mother is a good example to keep in mind, and yours probably is, too. It’s very off-putting to many newbies to complete the orientation training, and move into the mainstream of the world…and have no place to start and nothing organized to do! Many people I have brought to this experience have said, “Now what am I supposed to do?” after finishing their orientation. They simply don’t know where to go or what options exist, especially in worlds as large and varied as Active Worlds and Second Life. They don’t know where they are in the continuum of the virtual environment. Perhaps an “advanced orientation” exploration quest could be developed — where newbies are given a choice of 12 varied destinations and asked to complete a visit to five of them and win a prize. It would ease them into the mainstream better, because they would have a purpose, plus they would gain a frame of reference upon which to determine what they might personally like to do there.

2. Avatars cannot be moved between worlds. Time invested to develop and customize an avatar and its persona is wasted when the human leaves that world. Once we dress our avatar just the way we want, and fix their hair, shape, color and wardrobe exactly so, we have to start over in any other system — often with a more rudimentary or less expressive avatar. Wouldn’t it be nice if my Second Life avatar could put on her elven armor and pop over into World of Warcraft to be a fierce druid warrior for a few hours? Or if a Klingon from Star Wars: Galaxies could slip into a business suit and attend a corporate business meeting, then return later that night to the intergalactic battle?

3. Lack of facial expressions and body language. There.com has some limited lip synching and eyebrow waving for live speech, however, it is not close to real synchronization. To get users fully engaged with their avatars, the avatars need an almost unlimited number of choices for customization and self-expression. Most (all?) avatar systems have special animations that the human behind them can activate manually or macro in a sequence, but the avatar technology doesn’t yet let the avatars respond automatically and appropriately to audio or visual cues in the environment, such as the approach of a friend or a surprise. Expressive abilities are being developed now by companies like Danish RealXtend.

4. Griefing. Whether it’s putting ugly, flashing and rotating aerial advertisements up in a quiet and beautiful residential community, or using powerful devices to push avatars around against their will, or crashing a business seminar and being obscene continuously in the back channel chat, some players simply enjoy trying to dominate others. I observed this last week in a Metanomics presentation broadcast from There.com. A person in Second Life spent most of the hour making angry and sarcastic come-backs in text chat to practically every statement the There and CosmoGIRL presenters made.

5. No reputation system. Who are these people? Maybe Amazon.com and Ebay have spoiled us, but I would like to see a permanent reputation meter attached to each avatar that represents the community’s evaluation of their contribution and trustworthiness. Good rep? Better prices, invitations to exclusive events, unique items, special permissions. Bad rep? Booted out of groups, unable to buy land in desirable areas, muted in public presentations, display of a “caution” mark on their avatar. Activities could be provided to enable griefers to improve their reputation, like staffing a booth for a non-profit event in the virtual world, taking newbies on inaugural tours, or donating creative time or money to helping others solve problems.

Organizations

6. Unengaged management. Executives and managers who personally have little experience with virtual worlds or multiplayer gaming are challenged to make the leap of faith in a space where top-down control breaks down, where it is *fun* to participate in getting work done, and where the young or the IT department are suddenly the experts. That’s one reason why we see the leading technology companies engaged and few of the old line businesses — their managements have much more experience and are quicker to see the value and potential. Companies like IBM, Intel, Circuit City, Best Buy, Cisco and Rezzable are making big commitments because they can see the virtual future more easily and because they value innovation.

7. Touch-and-go companies. Organizations that go into virtual worlds to experiment and learn how they might apply to their business, pack up and leave after a minimal time there. Whether they have learned what they need to know or whether a “rogue” group within the organization set up the venture and then gets shut down, these organizations do a disservice to themselves and to the community they participated in. Instead of treating virtual worlds as potential new markets, and pulling out when the traffic numbers drop off, see what other lessons can be learned there. It’s not business as usual in the metaverse. Companies that make a long term commitment to the future of virtual worlds will receive value in ways we can’t fully comprehend today. Look at IBM. They don’t see avatars as customer traffic but as allies in inventing the future. They are investing in experimentation with the world and creating new products and expertise, which have made them the dominant voice in this space. That can only result in new customers who seek their expertise, both now and in the future.

8. Lack of imagination. Replicating the real world in the virtual world is a beginner’s mistake and works against the virtual world experience. Is there anything gained by having an avatar navigate frustrating tight corridors and low ceilings and doors that have to be opened manually, just because that is faithful to corporate headquarters? Avatars can fly! There is no weather! Keyboard navigation is clumsy! Avatars don’t get injured! Why not have open ceilings or permeable walls or instant teleports to distant locations? Why not put up presentations on giant screens outdoors that can be manipulated by the users instead of the presenters? Why not enlist visitors in developing a new product or service? Why not simulcast meetings held in the corporate auditorium to avatars in the virtual world (and broadcast the avatars back to the auditorium)?

9. Seeing virtual worlds as new markets. Marketing is something organizations understand, and virtual worlds are not. Corporate people who want to sell a new idea internally usually tout something’s marketing potential and how competitors are already engaged. While claiming that the people inhabiting virtual worlds are a good new market, marketers risk disappointment with the results if they truly expect traffic to make a difference. It’s just too soon in the maturity of both technology and users. We can’t justify participation on that basis yet. Companies that are making money or gaining new customers are selling services in the virtual world for use in the virtual world. In other words, small change. Virtual world traffic is simply too low for real world marketing impacts, although it is expected to develop dramatically in the next few years.

10. Security. While some corporations have become excited about the possibilities that virtual worlds offer in education, collaboration and creativity, they have had to confront the reality that the level of security they require for business or other confidential transactions simply doesn’t yet exist. Groups like the Open Source initiative, the Software Freedom Law Center, and Open Source Applications Foundation are working to develop greater security, user authentication and single sign on. They are confronting proprietary technology platforms, inconsistencies in database design, data transmission, and confidentiality by moving toward open source code and interoperability of avatars. These are years away, so in the meantime, most organizations have moved virtual world technology behind their own secure firewalls and continue to develop it there. This is unfortunate, since it removes important and valuable users and innovators out of the mainstream; however, Sun Microsystems’ Wonderland technology may provide a way to bridge both proprietary and public access. You can listen to a recent virtual panel discussion on these issues on UgoTrade’s blog.

11. Intellectual property protection. Content creators are rightly concerned about ways to protect their objects, code and writing from theft. Copyright laws are being challenged in new and unexpected ways. If you lose a virtual item, was it actually yours, or did it even exist in the conventional legal sense? Does the owner of the software code that runs the technology of the virtual world and the tools used to create an object actually own the object, especially if the user is participating via a “free” account? If an object is sold to another citizen of the virtual world, and the creator takes the currency for it but doesn’t deliver the item, what is the proper legal jurisdiction for making a complaint? Do copyright protections cover virtual items that may not be viewed to exist? Has the author lost any claim to ownership by allowing the item or texture to be widely distributed in the virtual world? The complexity of these issues makes it daunting for artists and developers who want to create for the virtual world. The World Economic Forum in Davos even had a panel on this topic last January — “Virtual Worlds: Fiction or Reality“.

We are increasingly a visual society, and young people already in the marketplace, as well as those who are just being born, will demand that traditional ways of doing business or having social interactions change — just as each upcoming generation has always done of its elders. The latest research is saying it’s not “if”, but “when” virtual world technologies become normative, and the dizzying number of Web 2.0/Web3.0/collaboration/standardization initiatives support it. Those in positions of authority today can’t afford to put their heads in the sand, or, as the Worldwide Web did to many Luddites only a dozen years ago, they will find they are trying to make buggy whips when everyone is driving Model A Fords only a few years from now. It’s time for leaders and aspiring leaders to become knowledgeable of virtual worlds and to contribute to making them the positive and constructive platforms they will become. How? Find an independent consultant who is not sponsored by a technology platform, and get the person to help you think through your own needs and options carefully. Or, if any of these disappointments really resonate with you, take one of them and start a crusade to change it! There are reputations and careers and satisfaction to be achieved by those who get involved now. This is the ground floor of a groundswell. It’s where the rubber meets the clouds. He who has ears, let him hear.

I’m sitting here tonight with three browser windows open. One has 22 tabs open on Second Life and virtual worlds news, and the other has 24 tabs open on virtual world research related to aging. It’s overwhelming, and I have only begun to scratch the surface of what’s out there waiting for me to discover it! How reminiscent this is of when the Web was in its early days! When people first discovered how to use a browser, and they (and I) spent endless nights and weekends “surfing with their pants on fire” just to see what was out there and revel in the incredible displays of creativity. There were two camps…the one that preferred text only and turned off those newfangled images that just got in the way, and the one that loved the pictures because they made the technology accessible for the first time to non-programmers. They even sort of split along Mac and PC lines for a time. While some purists still insist on working in ASCII and using FTP from a shell account, they are now rare. Most developers I know are as happy to see images now as the non-users were in the beginning. Quite simply, we are increasingly becoming a visual society, and more and more of our communications are graphical.

That’s one reason why I so readily see the parallel between the early worldwide Web and today’s virtual worlds. I thought about saying Web 2.0 or social media, but it’s really not all of that. It’s about virtual worlds. Everything I’m reading in these “tabs” of research is pointing in one clear direction…some sort of avatar. The avatars can be little humanoid figures one moves about on a screen in a game or social world, or they can be more human or animal-like robots programmed to perform complex, tedious or impossible tasks in real life. One paper discusses bots that are programmed to perform daily Internet searches on specific topics and return daily news and updates. Another discusses phone systems integrated with chat bots that can have conversations so nearly real that the customer can be fooled. Another talks about the elderly and having a furry “artificial companion” to interact with to enhance quality of life (think Tamagochi pets and how mature adult people worried about getting home to play with their pet so it wouldn’t get depressed and look at them with sad eyes). More and more sophisticated avatars are emerging. RealXtend, for example, is creating avatars based upon the bones of the human skeleton. They will display accurate body language and appropriate facial expressions, making them more realistic than the deadpan avatars of today.

Human beings are strange creatures. We can see right through most guises, yet we are willing to suspend our disbelief instantly for the right appealing concept. I think avatars are that concept. Right now most people don’t know how to use a keyboard to activate an avatar, and avatars are designed poorly and can’t be transported from one environment to another. That will all change in the next couple of years as virtual environments become more secure and pervasive at work and at home.

If you read my articles regularly, you know I am an advocate and proponent of virtual worlds and avatar social interactions. They enhance communication. I can accept equally well receiving customer service from a chat bot that scores well on the Turing test, or giving my elderly mother a furry bag that makes purring noises as long as she provides the right sort of input to keep it happy. I simply don’t mind that we might be creating an alien race of intelligent machines that will be smarter than us when we reach the Singularity at some point in the future. I think they are wondrous and amazing — phenomenal products of brilliant human imaginings and ingenuity. Yes, what we have now is crude. And we don’t have standards or single sign on across platforms or legal or physical protections or complete understanding of what we are inventing. Those will come.

Right now we are in the explosive “pre-cambrian” period of virtual worlds, just as we were almost 15 years ago with the Web. New ideas and concepts are coming fast and furiously from a lot of sources. I know because I’m sitting here looking at 46 tabs representing articles and blogs or news sites that I would not be seeing without the development of the Web. Incredible ideas and possibilities are surfacing from unknown and strange directions, and there are few who yet know how to capitalize on them. (If anyone says they do, then they are just dreaming.) There is a long learning curve ahead of us. We can, however, see that what is emerging is important and will change everything, even if we just don’t yet know how! That’s what keeps me waking up and sitting down to work every day. To me it’s clear — virtual worlds are changing everything. Another frontier stands before us, with gold waiting to be taken from the rivers, and it’s a great time to be alive! :)

This evening I read an article on Ragan.com by Christine Kent, that proposes what social media PR professionals should adopt or drop in 2008. While much of the article was about FaceBook and MySpace, the author quoted several sources who panned Second Life, saying it is a “barren wasteland”, a waste of time, “no one is there”, and “It’s turned into a hangout for porno freaks and weirdos.” These comments smack of inexperience in virtual worlds, to me, so I responded to the piece with the following:

I agree with the author that Second Life is not the right place for PR professionals. They will not interact with or reach business media people there. You may find this video of a panel discussion held with real world media in Second Life two weeks ago interesting (http://www.slcn.tv/metanomics-real-world-press-vw).

I disagree, however, with the assessment that SL is a “barren wasteland” or dying. What is dying is the hype that generated a lot of curious one-time visitors last year. Only people who are inexperienced in virtual worlds would measure their effectiveness by the amount of traffic. That is the equivalent of counting page hits on a web site. No one can experience the potential of virtual worlds by dropping in once or twice for two hours and assuming they have seen enough. (Especially if they have spent some of that time hanging out in cybersex places!)

There is a vital, intelligent and innovative group of people inhabiting virtual worlds like Second Life and Active Worlds today. They are the thought leaders, the pioneers, and the consultants who people will be turning to over the next 10 years for guidance about how to make virtual worlds work in a corporate environment. When The Well was young, people scoffed about anyone’s ability to have a “real” relationship with people you had only met online. A “community” was where you lived. When the Web was young, communicators and executives worried about losing control of their corporate messages if “everyone” had the ability to publish. The same was true with blogs and wikis. Forget about the cybersex stuff…that’s just an annoyance that exists like strip clubs around the corner from your office. You don’t have to go there.

Gartner, Forrester, Business Week and other respected publishers are bullish on virtual worlds. Gartner says they will be ubiquitous in business by 2011 (the government of China says 2010!). IBM is doing some tremendous work in conjunction with Second Life and some other virtual platforms to create interoperability standards based on open source platforms and secure identities. Just this week they announced a pioneering virtual data center for Implenia, and yes, the project lead happens to walk around the virtual project attired as a wizard. (They also announced ASME, a 3D visualization method that allows doctors to visualize patient medical records in an entirely new way. ASME allows a doctor to click with the computer mouse on a particular part of the avatar “body” to trigger a search of medical records to retrieve relevant information.) Watch for some other upcoming announcements from IBM featuring other applications for business processes. The National Academy of Engineers has identified virtual worlds as one of the top 14 challenges to be solved in the 21st century. And pay attention to the avatars and 3D representations you will see during the Beijing Olympics. I could give you many other examples.

Communicators need to let go of the stereotypes of virtual worlds as “games” or “fluff”. They are becoming serious social environments and business tools…just not for every business! As I remember, communicators were also slow to accept the Web in the late 90s because they didn’t understand it themselves and it threatened the way communications had always been done. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In the process of building out my project in Second Life, I needed to learn scripting so an object I created would be animated in a certain way. I’m no programmer, but I’m brave, so I signed up for a scripting class today. It was a short class, and only covered the basics, but it was a great reminder of what it’s like to set out to learn something new and accomplish it.

Adult learning theory says adults need to “do” — they can’t just sit and listen to endless lectures. They want to manipulate the objects, to sit in a circle and put pen to paper, or debate a topic with others. The most lasting and effective learning occurs in these types of situations.

Today my little avatar went to a strange location in Second Life to take a “class” from someone I have never met before and know nothing about. Amazingly, there were other people like me there as well…all of us over 40 (we asked!) and putting our naive selves in the hands of someone who may have been 16 and only one step ahead of us. Nevertheless, it worked out, because the instructor came prepared with some handout support we could keep for reference, and we spent the better part of the class on voice chat, learning by making mistakes or asking the group to help or explain something we just couldn’t get on our own. It was great! Everyone in the small class brought a different perspective, and was learning to script for entirely different reasons, yet we really did help each other. One guy had some simple programming background…enough to inform us that the scripting language was based on C++…which impressed us all even more when we finally accomplished our task. Three said they were teachers in real life, and were trying to learn how to teach their students about learning in virtual worlds.

The instruction was sketchy. Everyone had a lesson note card, and although the instructor tried to set the pace, the class quickly ran away with the session. While one or two lagged behind, stuck on one step or another, two others were running ahead and carrying on their own side conversation about how to solve the next challenge that the instructor had not yet introduced. Amazingly, we all ended up more or less together at the end of the class, cheering like children when we caused the cubes we had created to rise up, twirl suspended in the air, and change colors each time they were clicked on. Not bad for one hour! It is one thing to read or to hear. It’s an entirely different (and richer) learning experience to “do”.

Today’s bit of inspiration comes from The National Academies in Washington. Go figure. The National Academy of Engineering has declared “enhancing virtual reality” to be one of its 14 great challenges of the 21st century. Right up there with “Provide energy from fusion” and “Restore and improve urban infrastructure”. The choices fall into four themes that are essential for humanity to flourish — sustainability, health, reducing vulnerability, and joy of living, and the list is not ranked. They are offering the public a chance to vote on what they think the most important challenge is. You can vote here. Another item on the list is “Advance personalized learning”, which is closely related to enhancing virtual reality in my mind. Nice to have some serious minds coming to the same conclusions at last that some of us have been espousing for 10-15 years. This next 20 years is really going to be such an interesting and life-changing time to be alive!

Yesterday I participated in Metanomics’ excellent lecture series in Second Life on the study of business and policy in virtual worlds. Last week Robert Gehorsham, president of Forterra Systems, described how virtual worlds are being used by the military and entertainment industry, and where they are headed. Upcoming presentations are planned with Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com, game design guru Richard Bartle, and noted MMOG researcher Nick Yee. This week was a discussion on “Possible Futures of Virtual Worlds and Society”, a real life conference session hosted by Emory University, and featuring Chris Klaus, CEO of Kaneva, and John Zdanowski, CFO of Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. I recommend the series, if you share my interests.

The topic was interesting and relevant to me, but what I found most intriguing was sitting at the intersection between the real and the virtual. I’ve alluded to this intersection before. The Second Life Cable Network, an enterprising group of media professionals who broadcast programs from within Second Life to the real world, filmed the event, and broadcast it simultaneously in Kaneva, Second Life and Emory’s conference room. It was one of those bizarre, amazing and wonderful experiences that sometimes just happen. I was sitting in my real life office, watching my avatar in Second Life sitting in an audience of about 50 avatars in comfy chairs, looking at a panel of avatar speakers on a stage. Other locations in Second Life were also connected, streaming the feed to their own audiences.

Next to the virtual panel was a virtual video screen displaying the live Emory academic group in real time. Behind the panel of presenters on the dais at Emory were two projection screens — one showing our Second Life audience and speakers in real time, and the other showing the Kaneva world participants. Each of those screens also displayed the “back channel” typed chatting that was going on simultaneously in both virtual worlds, as we debated and questioned points related to the topic within our own virtual world groups. I could see my avatar seeing Emory and the screen behind them showing ourselves seeing Emory…and talking about it! The session moderator was at Emory in person, and his avatar was at the podium simultaneously in Second Life, fielding questions in the chat channel and conveying them to the live speakers at Emory. Finally, just to round out the experience, the avatar speaker panel were logged in to the Emory conference using Skype, so they were delivering their presentations simultaneously over two voice channels (three if Kaneva has live voice as well)! It was something really amazing to experience, and you can view the SLCN edit of the program here.

What occurs to me is how much differently humanity is challenged to participate in this type of interaction than we are in a traditional TV broadcast or classroom lecture. It’s like you have to switch your brain on in a new way to absorb information coming in from so many different channels simultaneously. I found I simply could not focus on just the Emory presenters or the SL typed chat or the experience of the experience, because they were all interesting and it was all happening faster than I could switch gears to follow. I had to open myself up to let it all flood in at once, without taking a linear approach to following the topic or focusing on just one channel of input. I had to become a sponge.

I read recently that the brains of the young generation are biologically different today. They are growing up with cell phones, text messaging, instant messaging, email, MMOGs, TV, global Internet research capabilities, connecting with hundreds or thousands of people, and they are comfortable swimming in that sea of input and participating actively in multiple channels at once. Their neural programming has adapted to produce the skills needed to deal with their environment. Older people like me have to make a concerted effort to do it. But when it clicks — like it did for me yesterday — there’s a glorious flooding of information that made me feel like when the giant alien ship in Close Encounters suddenly starts to “communicate” with its music and light display, or when Neo finally makes his personal connection to the matrix and is flooded by all the streaming green binary data. I got it! I was swimming happily along amidst all the things vying for my attention, like a bobber on a fishing line, and it was exhilarating! That doesn’t mean I’m any better at multitasking today than I was yesterday, but it does mean that I’m no longer intimidated by it. I will know how to switch on “sponge mode” again when I need to. Life is good.

Let’s just ignore that I haven’t written a blog commentary recently. Chalk it up to Second Life. Recently I have had some free time, so I have been helping a friend who purchased a sim/island in SL by planning and creating a place he can use to demonstrate to business leaders why virtual worlds are relevant. It’s been an interesting and joyously consuming task — to the wee hours of the morning on many days. Luckily I have friends (and you know who you are!) who keep me up-to-date on non-Second Life things in the gaming world–like this article by JC Barnett at the Japanmanship blog which gave me a good laugh.

http://japanmanship.blogspot.com/2008/02/tractatus-lascivio-philosophicus.html

Personally, I find most scholarly tracts to be grasping at inconsequential straws — sort of throwing things against the wall to see if they stick. For example, it has always seemed ridiculous to ascribe some of the meanings and nuances to poetry and literature that academics try to convince us were intended. It’s pretentious for them to assume they grasp the “meaning” of something the author intended that others don’t see, or that we poor fools need their insights before we can understand. I’ve written many poems. I’ve written a couple of books. While none of them are great literature, speaking as an author, I have grave doubts that most authors begin with a deliberate intention to create the multilayered complexities and nuances that scholars work so hard to deduce. But that topic is for another day.

Should we view games as exemplars of philosophy? I doubt it. There’s a psychology of game design/play, there is a technology of game design/play, there is a strategy of game design/play, and there is a consequence of game design/play; but unless you are talking about the most esoteric levels of the impact of “gaming” on the human condition or as a causal effect on human nature or behavior, it’s just self-important puffery designed to get someone tenure. We can’t really take it seriously!

Perhaps the article was slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it makes me a little apprehensive about gaming literature to come. Do we really need deep interpretations of games? Come on now. I don’t debate that many game developers are well educated and are aware of myths, legends, and the literature, as well as competitors, relevant to their current project. They put it into their back stories, and we relate to it because they are drawing on familiar archetypes to move a story line along. I simply don’t think it adds to the human experience in any way to ascribe deep, complex meanings to stories and characters that, for the most part, are, like most literary efforts, unoriginal. The plots and archetypes wear new clothes, but they are all part of our collective unconscious. That is what makes them powerful as gaming devices, and why it is so silly to pontificate about them. If someone can point out anything truly new in a literary or mythical sense in games today, please do correct me.

Because I’m asked occasionally where to get KM certifications or which KM conference is the best one to attend, I decided to put together a listing a few months ago. It’s also linked in the right column. The list is global, and I am not claiming it is comprehensive, even though it has a lot of sources. David Gurteen maintains a list on his web site that may also be useful, if you are looking for something yourself. Let me know if I’ve missed something that should be added! Thanks.

Whether social or business-to-business, the thinking that precedes the launch of a community initiative should be the same. For this article I am focusing on business communities of practice, both internal to the organization and external — engaging business partners and/or customers. If I were starting a new community, these are the things I would get answers to first. Planners and organizers will improve their chances of creating a successful community if they cover these questions before they plan their technology or their launch.

Objectives of the community

Participants

Management

Don’t expect them to be the same. Reconcile the differences.

Conditions critical for success:

Social/cultural

Technical

Organizational

In a perfect world, the community is self-governing and establishes its own rules and guidelines. Most corporate communities have some level of expectation on group membership, participation and knowledge capture for their communities. Be sure to communicate all expectations to the group’s members.

Who is the audience?

Issues

Experience with communities

Demographics

Voluntary participation vs. mandated participation

What do they have in common (basis for community)

Where and how does the regular, job-related work of these people intersect

When planning the technology, the launch and all the communications around a new community, it can help to have some specific people in mind. Identify two people who represent the key demographics and put up pictures of them to remind you who the users will be. It will help at planning crossroads and in defining the technology requirements.

Type of community

Online vs. face-to-face

Professional vs. work team

Employees only or include external members (clients, suppliers, customers)

Applied vs. theoretical

Open or restricted membership

Moderated vs. unmoderated

Technology Requirements

Plain vanilla or fancy features

What can you accomplish with technologies already part of the IT stack?

Will you include social media? (which, can you make it secure, guidelines for use, etc.)

Level of participant experience with communities

Finally, plan ahead for the unthinkable (moderator burnout, seasonal impacts, bad behavior, cliques, lack of funding, huge unexpected volume). Plan special training for community moderators. Plan to train the participants in using the technology. Plan to use management spokespersons to promote using the tools and the value of communities — both professional and for the business.

If you’d like to discuss any of these topics, please feel free to post a reply or send me an email.

The impact of immersive virtual environments is just starting to be felt by corporations, and is likely to have a significant impact on many businesses. The value of learning simulations has been chronicled for more than 10 years, but little has been written about the specific industries or processes that will benefit. The processes will vary by industry, but those that will benefit from virtualization will offer dramatic new opportunities for high impact corporate training. Skills or processes that involve social networking will be obvious starting points — for example, traditional training areas, such as new hire orientations, diversity and inclusion, ethics, sexual harrassment, cultural understanding, and policy changes. Talent management areas, such as critical thinking, leadership, logic, rational decision making, strategic planning, sales effectiveness, and negotiation skills will also benefit. In addition, employee and partner interactions are good candidates for virtual world interactions.

Traditional training is less effective in areas such as the construction of interactive device models, learning by discovery, acquisition and storage of domain expertise, and the automated presentation of instruction in the context of working device models (think airplane pilots or heavy equipment operators). Virtual environments excel at training for these areas. Complex tasks require learning by doing, and learning by doing in a designed virtual experience is much closer to the real thing than standard classroom role plays.

Simulations have limitations other than subject matter. Although the technology for virtual environments is improving rapidly, it is not yet robust enough for most business-critical processes. Users are largely unaccustomed to using avatars and 3D interfaces, so adoption rates can be low at the outset. Trainers themselves may find teaching through an avatar an unnatural skill that requires them to rethink their teaching style. Businesses probably have a window of 18-24 months to develop a virtual training strategy and begin implementing a technology solution.

As I defined it previously, a virtual world is “a persistent simulated space inhabited by multiple concurrent or non-concurrent users who share a sense of physical embodiment that enables them to interact imaginatively with others and experience real world outcomes.” Virtual worlds will not eliminate traditional training, since they are not designed specifically for education, but they will change significantly how learners learn. Research in the field, such as that by the U.S. Army Research Institute, shows a dramatic improvement in learning behaviors and effectiveness in learners using immersive virtual worlds. Unlike traditional page turning self-paced courses, virtual worlds provide a way for multiple users to enter a customized environment, together with the instructor or in teams, and interact with each other in real time using avatars to accomplish designed tasks. Avatars become increasingly relevant, since new employees raised on MTV and video games are accustomed to using them and readily make the leap from virtual world activities to real world learning. Existing teaching aids, like slide shows and video clips, can easily be incorporated.

Types of Virtual Environments

There are two types of virtual environments: gaming and social. Both may be used to achieve different educational objectives. Gaming virtual worlds have an element of competition, with the implication of a prize or reward for completing the game. People may socialize in them. Social virtual worlds are environments where people interact socially or professionally, may compete for rewards in them, and there is no final ending or completion. There are two broad areas of corporate training: process steps or procedures, and interpersonal skill development. Organizations will be able to achieve the fastest return on investment by focusing initially on interpersonal skills development and social interactions, which are multi-user in nature.

Different types of businesses will benefit in different ways from training in virtual environments. Field forces in hazardous roles, such as oil well drilling, chemical plant management, heavy equipment testing, explosives, material management, power plants or nuclear facilities, or even surgery, can learn using precise models of actual equipment they will be using and make mistakes harmlessly. Knowledge-based organizations such as far flung consulting or professional services firms can benefit from the social networking an collaboration inherent in a multi-user virtual environment. Other organizational areas that can benefit include recruiting, global networking, internal communications, and talent management and development. Fictitious environments or real world replicas can set up conditions conducive to good learning experiences. For example, in Second Life the University of California-Davis created a simulation of a schizophrenic/hallucinagenic experience to teach medical students. Caterpillar created simulations of mining sites to train dump truck drivers in operational hazards and vehicle controls. The U.S. Army uses virtual world courses to train soldiers in combat techniques and negotiations with local civil authorities. Virtual worlds provide excellent opportunities to recreate an historical period or travel virtually to places they have never seen, making them come alive to learners.

Some forward thinking companies have already begun to apply virtual worlds to real world processes and problems. Other organizations still have time to develop their learning strategies. Virtual world technologies are in a state of transition from a largely entertainment platform to a stable business platform. Existing issues with most of the include data security, user authentication, hacking, and intellectual property protection, but vendors are working aggressively to ameliorate those risks. The greatest security is still a proprietary system behind the corporate firewall. This can be accomplished using a number of technologies, including retired commercial gaming platforms such as The Sims, Asheron’s Call and Earth & Beyond, or newer virtual world platforms like Second Life, Forterra, There, Active Worlds, Kaneva or Entropia.

Evaluating Effectiveness

J.E. Morrison and C. Hammon of The Institute for Defense Analysis provide seven measures that can help when analyzing training effectiveness, which I paraphrase here:

1. Identify specific measurement issues
2. Create a measurement plan covering both performance measures and research design
3. Use valid and reliable performance measures
4. Impose normal experimental controls on the the research to the extent possible
5. Measure as accurately as possible
6. Use analytic models throughout the development of the simulation
7. Incorporate user feedback and reactions, in addition to performance data and analysis

Manipulating the variables of time and point of view contribute to an immersive feeling in a virtual world, and provide other measures for training success. These are especially relevant for training objectives of improved decision making and collaboration.

In order to retain a learner’s interest after a long period of time, normal online training courses use brief paragraphs of content, wide spaces between different ideas, hiding of unnecessary information with hyperlinks, and the use of color to separate different types of information. Instant access to online help and the ability for users to provide feedback throughout the training further enhance the learning experience. The equivalents in a virtual world include quests or tasks that can be accomplished quickly by an avatar, a back story that provides visual and spatial richness for the learner to experience between tasks, removing information related to tasks that have been completed previously or that the learner is not yet ready to perform, and visual identifiers for tasks that can be done (such as avatars identified by a symbol above their heads or colored lighting to highlight a location where a task can be obtained). Research also shows that virtual world training should focus more on measuring performance against training objectives, and less on the specific aspects of the operating system or user interface.

Recommendations

The high visibility of Second Life and its virtual economy have made virtual worlds a common discussion point in many Board Rooms. Gartner research says that by 2010, most leading corporations will embrace virtual environments for applications such as collaboration, education and communication. Training and development budgets for 2009 should include virtual environment development, including the internal communications and change management components that are vital to adoption rates. Corporations should begin to develop a virtual training and simulation strategy today that includes identifying their key business processes that might be taught effectively in a 3D simulation. If the senior management of the organization have little personal experience with gaming or 3D social environments (and that will apply to most corporations), outside consultants may be needed to ensure that the right decisions are made to make use of the medium. A virtual world is not an exact replica of the real world, and the team who will design the world needs to understand the differences that will make the virtual experience effective. Planning should also identify virtual world platforms with the security and functionalities required by both business users and existing IT systems. Enlist the aid of system architects to select an appropriate technology and understand clearly how learning management systems will or will not integrate with the virtual environment platform.

It’s nice to see that game developers are not forgetting the disabled players who make up nearly 25% of all gamers. There are an increasing number of organizations posted on the IGDA Disability SIG that lobby game developers or provide a product to help the disabled or those with limiting conditions to participate in a variety of games and learning simulations. Blind and deaf gamers are the most obvious recipients of extra love from game developers, since closed captioning and audio recordings are fairly easy to accomplish, but even the wheelchair bound, color blind, and brain injured can benefit. Games also contribute to improvements in some disabilities. For example, the elderly or people who have trouble with their eyes tracking properly show definite improvement from first person shooter games or other games that require reacting to fast-moving objects.

There are a variety of new devices to aid with even off-the-shelf games, such as Halo and Half-Life. They include things like larger controller/joy sticks; head, mouth and eye controls; and one-handed controllers. Three stores that specialize in devices for disabled gamers are Game Accessibility, Able Gamers, and Gimpgear. Christina Gonzalez has a nice story of her mother’s gaming experiences since developing multiple schlerosis in this month’s The Escapist magazine. Read other articles I’ve written on disabilities and gaming here, here and here.

For anyone who reads fantasy/sci-fi novels, you are familiar with Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. There is a point in the book where the young boy Ender plays a space war video game and manages (barely) to win. It turns out he was guiding a real battle in space, and it was not a game at all. His “simulation” was a command and control center device. Our technology is not yet at that stage of development, but some of the simulations I have read about recently made me think again about Ender. There are some obvious types of learning simulations, like the Microsoft Flight Simulator or the Nintendo Wii sports games. Some other useful ones include or might include:

1. Heavy equipment simulators. Caterpillar has developed a sim for dump truck operators in mines. Railroads use sims to teach train engineers and conductors, especially on new track segments they haven’t driven yet. The U.S. military uses them to train pilots flying in Iraq. The maritime industry uses thermal and mechanical simulations to model extremely wide and swift variations in temperatures, wet environments, fungus and solar radiation impacts to protect life and property.

2. Nation building. Diplomacy and strategic planning for real world situations are typically “gamed” in live, group-training sessions. Video games such as Sid Meier’s Civilization and Sim City provide rudimentary learning about the interactions and dependencies of components of a functioning nation. The French government even jumped on the band wagon by releasing a game where citizens can attempt to balance the national budget.

3. Pattern analysis. There are simulations to measure and modify traffic patterns. They have been modified to look at how a disease epidemic might spread. Police departments use pattern analysis to help identify criminal behaviors and identify virtual criminals. Chemists use simulations to do what-if scenarios on mixing different combinations of materials. Simulation science is also being used to identify flaws in our national infrastructure and protect them against exploitation and to model nanotechnologies.

4. Ethics and Leadership. Where better to let leaders and executives practice moral behavior than in a simulated environment? Of course, people using the sim will know what the “right” answers are, so we won’t really know what they might choose under stress and thinking no one is looking… Virtual interactions are experiential, so they can teach behaviors that are difficult to teach using books. For example, Modern Prometheus, a game developed by the University of California’s Annenberg School for Communication, uses the story of Frankenstein to teach ethical decision making. The player assumes the role of Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, who is forced to make a series of difficult choices that impact the game’s outcome. Leadership, logic and rational decision making skills can also be trained in a sim or a multiplayer game environment. Provide a challenging environment and a group of people with a complex task to complete, and the leaders will emerge to organize and direct the effort. Current research is showing game leadership is a good predictor for real world leaders.

5. Global impacts. Japan’s Earth Simulator Centre has a simulator used to model a wide variety of factors, including results of weather forecasts, projection of climate changes, such as global warming and El Nino, earthquakes and tsunamis. In a different global direction, multinational organizations can model the trade-offs between profitability and social responsibility and develop moral reasoning. New Media Consortium has built a conference center in Second Life where they aim to bring world leaders together virtually to discuss challenging issues they might not be able to discuss face to face and further world peace.

6. Virtual worlds. Fictitious environments or real world replicas can set up conditions conducive to good learning experiences in virtual worlds and multiplayer games. For example, in Second Life the University of California - Davis created an experiential simulation of a schizophrenic attack for medical students. Virtual worlds provide excellent opportunities for a period or a place to come alive to learners. Indiana University is creating Arden, an immersive game-like world where students interact with Shakespearean characters. School teachers are using an emerging game called Quest Atlantis for environmental and cultural studies and statistics. In Second Life, it is possible to visit an ancient Egyptian temple, a Victorian world, Uluru in the Australian Outback, or participate in pageants in ancient Rome, just to name a few.

7. Driving. Simucar is a real-time vehicle simulator that gives engineers the convenience and flexibility of extensively testing new vehicles in the laboratory before they hit the road. Developed jointly by General Motors (GM) Corporation and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) Corporation, the sim approximates the behavior of a vehicle’s sensors, actuators and operating environment so that it can be used to test a vehicle’s control modules. Such a simulation might also be used to train teenage drivers or immigrants with little driving experience to drive in conditions such as rain, fog and snow, to help prevent accidents new drivers typically experience.

Learning is undergoing a tectonic shift today. For older adults, simulations and virtual worlds may still seem to be the world of fantasy and games that have little relevance to “real life”. Young adults and those who will be entering the workforce in the next 10 years, however, will work completely differently than we work today. These workers are the digital generation — the first generation raised playing video games. They learn and work differently. Where learning used to be absorbing a set of facts, learning is now about how to find information to answer questions. It’s not as much a “what” but a “where”. Simulations are more effective than traditional methods have been at helping to develop thinking, reasoning, analytical and social skills, and helping learners identify and critique sources of information. In the case of hazardous environments or materials, they can also save lives. Educators don’t need to fear this new development, however. Virtual worlds and simulations still need knowledgeable, motivated teachers driving the train. Virtu