With the rise of virtual worlds since some years, cumulating 2007 in a hype around the Linden Lab world, the idea of working with virtual world paradigms has done a big step forward.
With the virtual worlds paradigm the following opportunities may enrich the user experience.
- Leveraging the collaboration between companies and individuals to a new tier
- Improve the collaboration experience for virtual teams, e.g. product development teams around the world
- Instant creation of working environments make the working interfaces extremly flexible and adaptable to the users or working group need
Virtual world working environments are collaboration environments by design. They don’t stick on single person user interfaces as they allow doing things “together”. Think of a collaboration scenario e.g. software development, where the teams are spread around the world and have to work on the same topics. Today, there are severe communication problems. Teams work together via document exchange, email, phone, interwise or virtual classroom (if they are really lucky). While an Interwise Meeting seems to be the most valuable way for collaboration it leaves some gaps. E.g. there is no “personal experience” between the participants and the group can not really build a reach working environment. Especially this gap is filled with virtual environments, as our experience tells us today.
We need real collaboration rooms for such teams. Further all collaboration is stick to the windows screens. And the group can not build up their own environment where different people can point to things, where several elements of interest are ordered in a go-through environment.
