Second Life Enterprise just went Beta. What does Enterprise do?
- familiar Second Life environment
- completely within the company intranet, behind the firewall
- prepackaged virtual regions, with a four-corners auditorium that can hold 400 people.
- set of standard business avatars.
Among Open Beta Participants:
- IBM,
- Northrop Grumman,
- Naval Undersea Warfare Center,
- DefenseWeb Technologies,
- Case Western Reserve University,
- The New Media Consortium,
Read the press highlights
- CNN, Going to the Virtual Office in Second Life
- InformationWeek, Second Life Steps into the Enterprise
- eWeek, Second Life Takes Virtual Reality Behind the Firewall at IBM, Navy
- Fast Company, Second Life Finds its Second Life as a Tool for Virtual Workers
- Financial Times, Linden Lab's Work-Second Life Balance
Look at all that coverage!
And I didn’t see a word about sex, BDSM, or marital infidelity. Looks like Second Life news coverage has turned a corner. Out of the bedroom, into the boardroom. Linden Labs will be making money on this. But what happens to the public world of Second Life if the business people go behind a firewall?
I like to use the virtual village model. What would happen if a company–say an insurance company--moved their offices to a village and barred the public from that office area? Well, the Chamber of Commerce would like it. The employees would be bringing their salaries into the village. Paying for goods and services. The insurance company would have non-public areas and public areas. In the public areas (think Second Life) the company would interact with the public. It would sell and service insurance policies, interview and hire employees, buy goods and services for its local operations, and (probably) build goodwill in the community. Maybe even buy pieces of art from local artists.
Would anything like this happen in Second Life? I think so. If the company will be conducting business in an environment like Second Life, it will probably be looking for employees who are experienced at working in Second Life. So it would naturally think of recruiting in Second Life. Actually, I have already talked to job recruiters coming into Second Life at the Rockcliffe Gateway. The jobs are in the outworld (“Real World”) with the usual outworld pay scale.
Solution Provider Directory of Virtual World Developers and Consultants
That’s one of the likely beneficiaries. Businesses leasing virtual offices from Linden Lab will look to Linden Lab for recommendations whey they want services. That’s what this directory provides. People who want to sell services to these businesses will probably benefit from getting a listing. Notice, BTW, that the full name of the directory uses the term Virtual World. Not Second Life.
That is a good move for anybody. I am telling the people I work with to get away from the term Second Life in their branding name choices. You don’t want a name that marks you as limited to the Second Life Grid. Especially not now that even Linden Lab is moving out of the box.
Will Enterprise workers look to Second Life for leisure activities?
That is TBD. They will have passed the steepest part of the learning curve. And their companies may encourage leisure participation in Second Life, because any experience in VR may improve the job performance for employees working in a VR environment. And there is a lot of potential in being able to draw on the network ecology of Second Life. But the other side of that question is what will the residents of Second Life be offering?
What should the residents of Second Life be offering? What will these potential newcomers want? Since this is for their leisure time, entertainment is a plausible answer. But that is an abstraction. And a value judgment, too. We have lots of entertainment in Second Life, but do we know what these potential newcomers would be looking for in entertainment?
I don’t know. I don’t even know the demographics, though I can guess that they will be unlike the current demographics in Second Life. I don’t see any good way of anticipating the demographics or the changes we will see in entertainment tastes. I will keep looking for that kind of information, but I think the word right now is get ready for changes.
Paradoxically, another change – a big one—may cut the importance of inworld entertainment. With a move to outworld entertainment.
Lauren looks to the outworld future
Lauren Weyland, famous comic in Second Life, foresees a future in which entertainment is produced in a virtual reality like Second Life and sent out via the web. Maybe we can use the term broadcast, although this use probably defies the original meaning of the term. Lauren is doing comedy shows for Treet.TV. These may be a forerunner of that kind of entertainment. But in the future such shows might get much wider distribution.
That wide distribution may already be available in the technical sense, via Hulu. The obstacles may lie in copyright issues now. Once those issues are resolved, the entertainment can be distributed, with ad support, to anyone who wants to watch it.
Lots more opportunities for creative people. Not just for performances. For those ads, too. Creative. Novel. Funny. And anybody can make one. They won’t all be good. So ad agencies will run contests.
Lauren says there will also be a passive audience of watchers. Don’t complain. The provide the eyeballs for the ads. They also serve who only sit and watch.
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Outworlding: VR penetrates the web
Avatar Repertory Theater presents its work on the web
This web page provides links to videos of productions by A.R.T.
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Metanomics - The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
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From ancient to virtual worlds
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