Virtual Worlds In The Enterprise

I’ve never really got into Second Life; I guess that I keep waiting for it to do something “useful”. Although I’ve heard of business meetings and conferences being held there, it’s not clear how that’s a lot better than other online conferencing environments that don’t include unrealistically-proportioned avatars with pseudonyms.

Last year, IBM demonstrated a similar virtual environment running an interactive management game in which the players optimize a business process (I referred to it at the time as a “first person shooter” game for business), so it’s no surprise to see progress in virtual world interoperability from IBM and Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life). Yesterday, the Second Life blog announced that research teams from the two companies have “teleported” avatars from Second Life into an OpenSim virtual world. Their goal:

Linden Lab sees interoperability as essential for virtual worlds to reach their full potential. In addition, interoperability will enhance Resident experience and the new architecture will improve scalability and stability.

Given the instability that we’ve seen in some walled garden environments lately (cough Twitter cough), interoperability is a very good thing. I’m still not sure of the business applications, although consider that there’s research going on at the Queensland University of Technology on BPM virtual environments.