2008 12 03 VW Panel At INSEAD

Eilif Trondsen, Ph.D., Director
Rob Edmonds, Senior Consultant
3 December 2008: VWW Virtual Meeting
Summary
3 December 2008: VWW Virtual Meeting3 December 2008: VWW Virtual Meeting
SummarySummary
http://www.sric-bi.com/VWW

2© 2009 by SRI Consulting Business Intelligence. All rights reserved.
ContentsContents
Meeting Objectives and Format
Themes and Issues
Robin Teigland, Stockholm School of Economics: Comments and observations
Dick Davies, Ambient Performance: Comments and observations
Randy Hinrichs, 2b3d: Comments and observations
Chris Lassonde, Millions of Us: Comments and observations
Summary of chat discussions
Resources
Sponsoring and supporting organizations

Meeting Objectives and FormatMeeting Objectives and Format
The overarching theme of this virtual meeting in Second Life (SL) was “user adoption and user
experiences in virtual worlds (VWs).” We wanted to hear a wide range of perspectives and had
therefore invited four speakers—two from Europe and two from the United States—with very
different backgrounds.
We expected to hear a diverse set of perspectives both because of the nature of this topic and
because of the diverse backgrounds and experiences of our panel members. We heard about
issues and developments relating to private and public or government sectors, industry or
commercial as well as academic or university sectors, and of course European versus U.S.
developments.
We also had a very diverse set of attendees: Four organizations helped organize and support the
session:
SRIC-BI’s Virtual Worlds @ Work (main organizer and sponsor)
INSEAD (a major business school, with its main campus in Fontainebleau, near Paris,
France)
SDForum’s Special Interest Group for VWs
Gronstedt Group (a U.S.-based training company with strong interest in VWs).
The meeting used SL’s audio (or voice over IP), but we also had a very active chat during the
meeting, during which speakers answered questions, and attendees had their own ongoing
dialogue about issues that arose during the meeting.

Themes and IssuesThemes and Issues
The meeting, which took place at INSEAD’s futuristic Second Life campus (see the
picture of the auditorium to the right), addressed a range of issues:
Degree of user adoption in different regions and
sectors and types of applications that are emerging
Consumer and game/entertainment VWs versus use
of VWs in government and the enterprise sector
Unique capabilities and functionality of VWs and
what they offer versus what other technologies offer
The current economy and its impact on the VW
industry
VW projects that have seen implementation or are under way in Europe and the
United States
New and innovative uses of VWs and of SL in particular
Design of VW environments to achieve specific objectives
Predictions for what the VW industry will see in 2009.

RobinRobin TeiglandTeigland: Comments and observations: Comments and observations
Robin Teigland—Karinda Rhode in SL—is a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics; she
focuses on international management. She has long been interested in VWs and is active in SL. One of
her interesting projects in SL was a collaboration with Steve Mahaley of Duke Corporate Education; it had
students do collaborative teamwork. More information about Robin is at www.knowledgenetworking.org .
Contact her at robin.teigland@hhs.se.
One of the difficulties facing academics interested in VWs is that the incentive structure in
academia encourages professors to do research that can result in publications in well-known,
scholarly journals. This structure drives their choice of research topics and may discourage
investment of time in exploring the use of VWs to improve learning for students.
In Scandinavia and in other parts of Europe, Robin sees no clear trend in
which academic disciplines or SL applications are finding most use in
universities. She sees mostly small experiments, driven by small groups
of people who see the potential of VWs. Most of the activity is around
teaching and learning how SL can serve effectively for teaching and
learning, although activity and interest in how these environments can
serve for research are growing. She believes that most of the activity in
her part of the world focuses on higher education and relatively little
activity on schools or K–12 (although in other parts of the world, projects
focus on the SL’s Teen Grid).

RobinRobin TeiglandTeigland: Comments and observations: Comments and observations——continuedcontinued
Robin referred to some interesting projects that have launched:
A collaborative project (“Kamimo Islands”) around learning in SL involving the
university college of Molde in Norway, Kalmar university college, and Central Missouri
State University in the United States. This project is funded by the Norwegian University
Program. It involves a number of projects and activities, including language (“Social
English”) teaching for students in various countries in Northern Europe.
Use of SL for teaming and media communications by students at Stockholm School of
Economics. Swedish architecture students at various institutions, including the Royal
Institute of Technology (KTH), have also been experimenting with SL. In the Netherlands,
students at Free University (Vrije University) have been using SL to explore group
decision-support systems (the University of Delft has also been an early adopter of SL).
An interesting project in Sweden that a large construction firm in Sweden—HSB—
launched involving competition in SL for design students to design the “house of the
future.” The company expected benefits from improving brand and image among
students as well as new insights about housing preferences of young people.

RobinRobin TeiglandTeigland: Comments and observations: Comments and observations——concludedconcluded
In the discussion about the likely impact of the current economic downturn on the VW
industry, Robin noted that we need to put the current situation in a larger historical
context—history tends to repeat itself—and that when the turnaround comes, it will likely
be the beginning of a period of renewal. Historically, many innovative companies have
been born during recessions, and companies that find ways to survive and build
foundations during such times are very well positioned for the time when the economy
turns around.
Robin hopes we will now see less focus on technology per se and greater emphasis on
user experience and designing user interfaces that will enhance the overall user
experience in VWs. By the time the economy turns around, we will also likely see growing
numbers of young people in the workforce who are interested in using VWs in their work.
Robin also noted that in her discussions with executives at MindArk in Sweden—the
company behind Entropia Universe (which has a very ambitious project in collaboration
with the Beijing municipal government)—she found that the company expects game- and
entertainment-based spending to continue growing in the recession as consumers
substitute such activities for other, more expensive activities. Recent data about consumer
expenditures on video games seem to confirm this prediction.

Dick Davies: Comments and observationsDick Davies: Comments and observations
Dick Davies—Seys Sontse in SL—is a principal at Ambient Performance in the United Kingdom and
has been active in many projects in Europe involving the Forterra’s OLIVE platform; Ambient
Performance is a European partner of Forterra. Dick has many years’ experience with learning and
learning technology, and his current activities focus mostly on the use of VWs in large organizations—
including global enterprises and government—and, in particular, on use of VWs for applications in the
health (including emergency evacuations training, and so on) and military sectors.
Dick has seen strong response by decision makers in the health and
military sectors to the use of VWs for distributed collaboration,
sustainable business practices, shared information spaces, and similar
applications that can help organizations improve the efficiency or
effectiveness of their distributed operations and reduce their carbon
footprint.
Some of Dick’s current projects that illustrate the type of applications
that he expects to see more of involve the oil and gas industry, which will design a
virtual facility and allow users to provide real-time feedback to the design and help
improve the overall design. Dick expects that in the future, operations will be fully
simulated before any facility is actually built.

Dick Davies: Comments and observationsDick Davies: Comments and observations——continuedcontinued
Using VWs platforms for collaborative design—including giving users control of certain
design elements, such as specific elements of ergonomics or evacuation, for example—
could result in significant improvements in facilities design. Users could then also have an
opportunity to experience how to work in and operate the facility and thus suggest redesigns
that would improve business processes. Dick noted that the CEO of Autodesk, Carl Bass,
has long argued that the design of airplanes, for example, should give pilots, passengers,
and maintenance personnel opportunities to operate, fly, and do maintenance operations on
the plane in design, to ensure that the plane would meet the needs of different
constituencies. (It is interesting to note that a plug-in—SLTk Pro—for Autodesk’s advanced
modeling tool, Maya, now allows users to create and export objects for SL.)
A number of oil and gas companies around the world are currently testing and
experimenting with a number of different VWs platforms to learn how they can best use
these emerging technologies. These companies are (yet) saying little publicly about their
ongoing experiments and pilots, but one of the areas of strong interest to many of these
companies involves real-time data visualization inside VWs. But other applications of VWs
that some of these companies are testing involve the design of very attractive and futuristic
meeting facilities where personnel from around the world can meet and socialize with their
colleagues and attend meetings.

Dick Davies: Comments and observationsDick Davies: Comments and observations——concludedconcluded
Dick noted that he was ready to discuss the use of the OLIVE platform at a large financial
organization that is considering a global rollout to meet the following objectives:
Travel substitute. The company hopes to cut back on travel, from both cost and
carbon-footprint considerations, and views VWs as an interesting option that brings
more functionality than other options (like conference calls, videoconferencing, or the
(very costly) telepresence offerings of Hewlett-Packard [HP] and Cisco). A growing
number of large companies, including IBM and Cisco, have implemented travel-
reduction plans in recent months, for cost and other reasons.
Sustainable business practices. The company wants to reduce the adverse
environmental impact of its operations. Growing numbers of companies have similar
objectives and are taking this step as part of their brand-improvement efforts.
Innovation stimulation. The company, like so many others, wants to encourage
creativity and innovation and believes that the use of VWs can send a message to
employees and business partners that the company is supportive of change, including
the use of new technology platforms that can facilitate open innovation. Growing
numbers of companies are now active in pilot projects to see how they can best use
VWs platforms to stimulate innovation.

RandyRandy HinrichsHinrichs: Comments and observations: Comments and observations
Randy Hinrichs very graciously offered to take the place of Mike Piller of the Federal Consortium for
VWs (Mike had an unexpected meeting). Randy—Ran in SL—has a very interesting background. In his
previous life at Microsoft, he led numerous initiatives and projects involving learning technology; he
now is active in a number of fascinating virtual-worlds projects from his base in Seattle, Washington.
Randy is president of 2b3d, which focuses on the use of VWs for a wide range of business and learning
applications. He is also working closely with the University of Washington in this area.
Randy sees more similarities than differences in how organizations and
users now are adopting and using VWs around the world. And given what
he is seeing in his projects for clients, he is clearly bullish in terms of the
degree to which VWs will see use for a wide range of applications in the
enterprise, government, and academia. He sees VWs contributing to a
“renaissance of innovation” in learning, collaboration and prototyping,
and creation of social spaces.
VWs will contribute to innovation partly through serendipitous encounters and new
personal relationships that come out of such encounters (which Christian Renaud, the
former VWs evangelist from Cisco, also believes is one of the significant benefits of VWs).
Randy also believes that VWs environments will slowly break down time and tend to erode
the 8-am–to–5-pm working convention that we have long operated under.

RandyRandy HinrichsHinrichs: Comments and observations: Comments and observations——continuedcontinued
One interesting phenomenon that Randy has seen emerging in VWs is what he referred to
as “nanoconsulting,” in which individuals buy small amounts of time from someone with
some specific expertise or experience. Someone active in a project can therefore ask an
expert to teleport into a location to review and provide comments and suggestions about
some project or prototyping. Randy believes that VWs environments provide a much better
context for such nanoconsulting activities than alternative approaches—phone, video, or
Web-based collaboration tools—offer, and he therefore sees this type of consulting
practice’s becoming much more common in the future. This development will be
reinforced by the likely development of firms and individual consultants and entrepreneurs
with virtual offices in SL.
Randy has been very encouraged by a significant upswing in large-scale projects in the
enterprise, government, and academic sectors and growing enthusiasm among the
executives he deals with. He sees their interest as driven by the following needs: reduction
in training costs, decrease in travel (as Dick has also seen in Europe), improvement in
business processes, and easier and better collaboration among virtual teams (driven by
growing globalization of business). Although cost reduction is an important driver, Randy
sees the need for collaboration inside and outside the enterprise as a major driver behind
the use of VWs. He also believes that VWs do a better job in building (personal)
relationships than do other tools that we currently have.

RandyRandy HinrichsHinrichs: Comments and observations: Comments and observations——concludedconcluded
Randy also believes that VWs offer greater opportunities than other technologies for people
to interact at a deeper level for both business and social purposes as a result of being in
immersive environments for longer periods (these environments also allow for interesting
combinations of social and entertainment activities—such as visiting a jazz club, for
instance—and business activities).
In terms of learning, science is among one of the most exciting areas in SL. SciLands is
particularly interesting because it is a specialized region of SL for science-and-technology–
based organizations like the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA), and others have very interesting and educational exhibits (the region also contains
the International Spaceflight Museum). Randy sees growing interest in integrating large data
sets into VWs, to visualize and demonstrate—increasingly in real time—both scientific and
business processes. A growing amount of data, the result of growing use of sensors for data
collection everywhere, will also likely help drive this type of visualization and data
integration into VWs.
Finally, Randy noted that one does not have to speak foreign languages to communicate
with others in SL, because translating tools and technologies are available in SL—including
Babbler and De-Babbler (see Resources on page 19). In connection with the growing
collaborative activity in SL driven by globalization of business that Randy mentioned earlier,
language translation will likely see growing use.

ChrisChris LassondeLassonde: Comments and observations: Comments and observations
Chris Lassonde is president and cofounder of Millions of Us (MoU; formerly part of Linden Lab). He
graciously agreed to step in when Reuben Steiger, the CEO of MoU, went away to an urgent meeting.
Millions of Us is a leading social-media agency that has helped numerous organizations with designing
their virtual-worlds strategies and operations. Chris has been a game developer for his entire career,
which serves him well given the nature of the work that MoU is doing and its target audience.
MoU is primarily working on consumer-focused, commercial
platforms, and much of the company’s work deals with game- and
entertainment-focused VWs. It has extensive experience with many
VWs and has explored more enterprise-focused platforms like
Forterra and Qwaq. Most of the users that MoU deals with are younger
than 13 years, and thus MoU serves a very different user segment
than the other panelists mostly deal with. But this user base that MoU
serves is what will likely have a major impact on the workplace in the
not-too-distant future.
All the VWs that these kids are using are browser based, and although this construction
constrains the immersiveness of these worlds, accessibility and ease of use improves
dramatically over both in SL and other VWs based on “think clients” that require major
downloads (and thus result in very low conversion rates of potential users to actual users).

ChrisChris LassondeLassonde: Comments and observations: Comments and observations——continuedcontinued
Game play rewards players for the behavior that the game developer wants to promote,
and Chris noted this bias or orientation at MoU. MoU has extensive experience and
expertise in designing game-based or social VWs to achieve the goals set for the worlds,
whether they are to encourage people to communicate, to socialize, or to achieve other
objectives. In some worlds, this activity involves using currencies or desired and scarce
objects that users want in a particular VW.
The issue of user-generated content in VWs was raised and discussed by the panelists and
also in chat discussion. Chris noted that it is important to give users ownership, and MoU
can do so in different ways, including giving them a piece of “land” or tools to create
content that they in turn can give or sell to others. (SL has a vibrant economy, with daily
transactions that exceed an estimated $1.5 million; other VWs, including Gaia, have
similarly strong economies but don’t involve conversion of the world currency into U.S.
dollars through an exchange-rate system that SL has.)
In response to the question about the impact on the VW industry from the current
recession, Chris noted that he sees developers hunkering down, trimming staff or stopping
hiring and going into defensive mode in preparation for 2009. He therefore expects a
slowdown in development of VWs in the next year and fewer new developments. (But MoU
may be relatively less affected if consumers continue to favor relatively inexpensive game-
or entertainment-based activities.)

ChrisChris LassondeLassonde: Comments and observations: Comments and observations——concludedconcluded
The topic of Google’s Lively came up in the panel discussion and in chat, and Chris made
the following comments:
Lack of immersiveness (relative to SL and others) was not a major reason for Lively’s
failure.
Lively suffered from a relatively poorer “feature set” than those of other VWs that it
had to compete with.
Google has a tradition of experimenting with and testing new ideas, and the company
concluded that it would be better off focusing on its other core products: Search,
Google Apps, and advertising.
At the end of the session, the question was about predictions for 2009. Chris ventured the
following predictions:
Next year will see a Fortune 50 or Fortune 100 firm entering the VW industry, as Google
did in 2008, but it will likely have more staying power than what we saw for Google.
We will see growing attention to user experience (Linden Lab has already a number of
initiatives under way on this front, both with its own Web site and in exploring new UIs
for its client).

Summary of chat discussionsSummary of chat discussions
What role and function do avatars really serve? Do we need them? And how important is it
that they are able to express body language? A number of perspectives focused on these
questions:
Avatars can show some degree of body language and users can express themselves
through their design and dress and so on of their avatar. Linden Lab’s puppeteering
project may also bring more flexibility to avatar movement and motions.
Other objects associated with avatars can also be designed to express and communicate
specific signals or messages. (Eilif’s Viking helmet has become a well-known feature of
his avatar look, for example, linking him to his Viking heritage.)
Avatar looks and outfits can be context specific (some SL residents have many avatars
that they chose among, depending on the context).
Someone questioned whether telepresence technologies—which HP
and Cisco have been marketing aggressively—offer a more useful
technology for many business applications than VWs and avatars
offer. Telepresence provides high-quality communications and
images of meeting participants (and true representation of users)
but come at very high cost. Telepresence technology also doesn’t
offer a number of other features that VWs provide, including
serendipitous encounters and flexible ad hoc group discussions.

Summary of chat discussionsSummary of chat discussions——concludedconcluded
Some attendees expressed the belief that VWs would find most
use for internal corporate applications rather than external,
customer-focused use. Internal applications would include
teamwork and collaboration, meetings and prototyping, and so
on. One attendee was very interested in using VWs for product
development and to enable virtual-product life-cycle
management.
Issues currently affecting the use and utility of VWs, especially SL, were discussion topics
in chat. Specifically, the issues of instability and unreliability were topics, but other issues
also had discussion:
Inability to ensure privacy of sensitive information (but note that IBM and Linden Lab
are working on allowing enterprises to create SL behind their firewalls)
The anonymity of avatars in SL, which causes difficulty in business, where one needs
to know whom one is dealing with
High bar relating to bandwidth and PC (including graphics-card) capability
Difficulty of searching for and finding things in SL
Inability to protect against malicious mischief and griefing that sometimes occur.

ResourcesResources
http://www.3pointd.com/20061229/hud-free-language-translation-for-second-life/--Babbler
and De-Babbbler for language translation in SL
http://www.elearningeuropa.info/community/index.php?page=forumtopic&f=1&t=23 –
Collaborative project: Molde, Kalmar and Missouri
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/seriousvirtualworldsreport.aspx – Serious
Virtual Worlds: A Scoping Report; by Sara de Freitas; Serious Games Institute
http://www.hhs.se/sv_default.htm (Stockholm School of Economics)
http://www.ambientperformance.com
http://www.2b3d.net
http://www.millionsofus.com .
The following Web links provide access to reports that directly or indirectly address some of
the issues that we discussed during the virtual meeting at INSEAD in SL:

Sponsoring and Supporting OrganizationsSponsoring and Supporting Organizations
SRIC-BI’s Virtual Worlds @ Work—For more information, see http://www.sric-
bi.com/vww .
INSEAD (a major business school, with its main campus in Fontainebleau, near Paris,
France)—For more information, see http://www.insead.fr/home/ .
SDForum’s Special Interest Group for VWs—For more information, see
http://www.virtualworldsig.com .
Gronstedt Group (a U.S.-based training company with strong interest in VWs)—For
more information, see http://www.gronstedtgroup.com .

2008 12 03 VW Panel At INSEAD

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