Virtual Reality or the Virtue of Reality?
Recently, there was an article this week on ComputerWorld.com titled “Have your avatar call my avatar: Doing business virtually.” It led off with a report on a Xerox meeting and product rollout that was held simultaneously at Boston’s Fenway Park and at Xerox Inspiration Island in Second Life. (One Xerox exec supposedly made a rather spectacular crash landing there in her virtual personal jetpack.) The object of this event was to both showcase the new product and to test out Second Life as a vehicle for meetings.
While noting that the melding of the virtual world with the real world is still in its infancy, the author says: “Be warned. Many think it’s just a matter of time before being ‘in-world’ becomes as important for business as having a Web site and standard teleconferencing is.”
Be still, my foolish heart. It seems to me we already have enough ways to avoid actual contact with other human beings. Emails, and chat rooms, and FaceBook, oh my! Let’s see how many days we can go without having to actually interact in person. Even without Second Life, I know cubicled office workers who seldom interact face-to-face with each other unless somebody calls a meeting or they can’t avoid each other at the coffee pot. (I don’t consider the prairie dog pop-up a real face-to-face encounter.)
Maybe avatar-to-avatar contact is the future of business communications, but I won’t go down that road without kicking and screaming—at least until they figure out how to provide real cold beer in their virtual worlds.