Business take on SL

I ran across this business report recently and thought you might be interested. I think it is interesting that the things they were trying to do were very "old school" technology:

"Having a Team Meeting in Second Life

By Tom Werner

As you may know, Brandon Hall Research has been investigating the usefulness of virtual worlds as platforms for learning. To this end, our team recently had a meeting in Second Life. It was an interesting experience. Here are some thoughts.

On the PLUS side:

• It’s a novel environment and, thus, kind of energizing for the group, like any new setting can be.
• You can arrange pleasant meeting areas in Second Life, and that seems to have a positive effect (we met “outdoors” in Second Life, on a nice deck area).
• Once you get set up to show PowerPoint slides in Second Life, you can do it fairly well (although a Web-conferencing tool would be more practical if the object is to show PowerPoint slides).
• There’s some pleasant sense of experiencing fellow meeting participants as physical representations rather than simply as voices (although how pleasant this is may vary for each individual).
• There can be entertaining side-activities in Second Life. (Our avatars hopped into a nearby hot tub after the meeting.)

On the DOWN side:

• The meeting is affected by each member’s ability to navigate (although that’s true with any technology).
• Practical meeting tools (like pointers) are better in Web-conferencing tools than in Second Life (although various tools are available in Second Life, and this is bound to continually improve).
• If the meeting is primarily information-sharing and discussion, a killer advantage of Second Life isn’t obvious (although you could conceivably argue the same thing about a conference call versus Web conferencing).
• It’s debatable how conducive Second Life is for meetings. It’s safe to say that even Second Life enthusiasts would say that a standard meeting doesn’t particularly take advantage of the unique aspects of Second Life (for example, 3-D).

All of this reminds me of word processing on PCs in the 1980s: the advantage of typing a memo in a word processor in 1988 versus on a typewriter wasn’t all that great. It was the potential — that everyone would eventually be a content creator, content storer, content sharer — that was the big thing.

We’ll probably continue to meet in Second Life periodically because (a) the “field trip” aspect is fun for our team and (b) it seems important to “feel” the progress of Second Life, Wii, and similar tools."