By Tim Ferguson, 27 October 2008 11:00
COMMENT
New front-ends, please
Before businesses ramp up their involvement in virtual worlds, though, improvements in the worlds themselves are needed.
In particular, poor front-end interfaces and difficult sign-up processes hold back adoption for business users as well as the general public.
Gartner analyst Steve Prentice described the current user interfaces as "bad to worse".
FFW's Naylor agrees that user interfaces need to be improved as they don't currently meet the expectations users have of them - causing people to quickly lose interest.
IBM's Smart predicts more web browser-based virtual worlds will appear over time, meaning users won't have to spend time downloading and setting up client applications.
Other factors holding back virtual worlds include limited bandwidth and processing power on users' computers. Not enough of either can make accessing a virtual world slow and laborious. The spread of fibre and the continual arrival of faster computers could soon solve these kinds of issues.
Just like the web
Despite these challenges, experts agree virtual worlds have a big future for business collaboration and as a new channel for conducting business.
The teething problems they're experiencing are not unlike those faced by the web back in the 1990s.
FFW's Naylor points out that like the web, businesses initially jumped into virtual worlds before working out what to do with them - and attracted criticism as a result.
Naylor added, though, that many of the companies that persevered with the web ultimately found success. Virtual worlds could follow the same pattern. "It's not going to be an overnight sensation," he said.
Gartner's Prentice said businesses are sceptical about virtual worlds in the same way they were about the web when it first started to attract mainstream attention nearly 20 years ago.
But he believes their true potential remains untapped. "They may become potentially as significant as the world wide web was," he said.
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. Antony van Zyl
As the hype cycle of virtual worlds finally fades into the distance, it is being replaced by practicality. Now businesses and organizations are looking at the practical applications of these immersive words.
Instead or a collection of furries or the squeals of joy at a new penguin, avatars are being placed in training seminars, meetings, visual warehouse management and much more.
The new era of practical applications are being brought to the fore by conferences such as the Second Life Business conference in Portland
2. Richard Davies
Having meetings in the virtual world to save flying employees around the world...have these people ever heard of video conferencing!
Also...using the virtual world for project collaboration...someone should show them web portals!
I always wondered why businesses would be interested in a virtual world and all the examples given seem pointless because there are already good solid solutions to these problems in the real world.
I could only imagine a business using this medium instead of another if this was the medium that your customer base used.
3. Isaac Squires
At GeniusRoom, we are building out a virtual world (using the Warb engine), to sit on top of our existing communications framework. I agree with the author that there is a lot of value in the interactive nature of virtual worlds for getting people together. Our take is that there isn't an environment out there, that's conducive to business, rather than teens & hype.
4. Andrew Breese
This will be slow growth, led from innovations not planned for ad environments. Online worlds are typically for socialisation and escapism, and most folks don't want ads in those spaces.