Virtual Worlds advantage over Real Life
In my experience, copying Real Life environments and work methods to a Virtual World does not work. In theory there is nothing wrong with that approach, but in practice all the limitations we have due to hardware, software and network latency, you can usually get a better user experiece by having a meeting (or whatever you plan to do) in Real Life.
This realXtend meeting area is not copied from Real Life
I still believe that Virtual World applications can be made efficient and enjoyable to use – and even to degree that they are better than Real Life counterparts. To make this happen, we need to carefully take advantage of all the benefits we get from using a virtual world, while avoiding any obvious shortcomings.
Benefits:
The use of space; it is expensive in Real Life to use a lot of space. In virtual worlds, the space is practically free (although Linden Lab is seriously trying to limit this aspect in Second Life – but they need their business, right?)
The use of objects; it is expensive and difficult to move around big/huge objects in Real Life. In Virtual World environment you can create and throw around house-sized rocks if you wish.
Moving around; In Real Life, it takes hours to move back and forth from a meeting room to lunch and back, to home and to office – not to even mention long haul flights. In Virtual Worlds, the whole working team can be teleported to another working location to do something else. You can fly from a place to another. Physical location loses its grip (but you need to eat, lets not forget that).
Shortcomings:
Communication; In Real Life, much of communication is said to be non-verbal – included in tone of your voice, body posture, movements, tiny change in your eyes. Virtual Worlds are not even close here – in better ones you can use voice over IP, in most, you need to use bare text chat. This is getting better over time, though.
Fidelity; When using desktop virtual reality, we are bound by the size of the monitor. When compared to reality, it is like looking world through a small box. Sound may not be spatialized. In other words, the experience is of low quality. This is something which will get better over time – there will be new hardware, better software and faster networks.
When the technology matures, we will see more and more applications being possible and appealing for virtual worlds. The technology is already at such a level, that many applications become possible. I will post about these applications in the future as I have many interesting ideas to share with you.
In case you want to add benefits/shortcomings, please comment below or mail me and I will edit the post to contain them (in case I agree!).
