IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

After my Video-on-the-net experiment with Second Life a couple of weeks ago, I decided to try a new experiment. It was simple. Just hold my next weekly staff meeting in second life.

It started out pretty rough. After announcing my intention to hold the meeting "In the Grid," or in the "Metaverse", or in Virtual Reality, whatever you want to call it, one of my team members did not have a laptop with a 3D graphics card, ergo no second life and another had a Dell laptop where the application kept crashing. Kudo's to our IT department for resolving these issues within the week, upgrading the one employee to a new Thinkpad T43 and providing a desktop temporarily for the other.

The next thing I needed was a place to hold the meeting. Not knowing my way around second life too well yet, the only place I really knew of that would be business-like was Jeff Pulver's Pulveria center, so I shot him a request to use it and he quickly responded. It's not like a regular conference center, so I probably didn't need to send him a request to use it, but I thought it would be polite none-the-less. For some reason, trespassing still feels like trespassing even if we're only talking about virtual property.

Before the meeting started, my team members were online trying to figure out the UI. We chatted briefly while messing around with our hair and made pointy, uncomfortable looking chairs to sit on while waiting for meeting time. At meeting time we went into the conference room and found seats, and launched into the agenda. The agenda lasted shorter than normal, so we wrapped up by talking a little about second life and whether or not it was valuable. The verdict?

Click Read more below to find out!

It was distracting.

Time was spent that morning getting familiar with the controls, and it was tempting to do things in second life rather than attend to work duties. During the meeting itself the program hogged the screen and the computer resources making it difficult to do much of anything else, such as look at spreadsheets (bad), email (good), and IM (good). In that sense, the UI did it's job of creating a more immersive meeting experience, but it was bad in that it did not allow us to bring the basic tools of our trade with us into the grid.

Just before the meeting closed, one of my team members said "hey, at least we sort of got the chance to be in the same room for a while". You see, my team is spread out between Tucson, Rochester, and Denver and we rarely get to meet face to face. The opportunity that the team had to be "in the same room" offered a certain modicum of personal interaction that was better than none at all.

I may try the experiment again, but next time I may set aside an hour or two on Friday afternoons for second life hangout. Maybe once we are more established users and are a little more "at home" there it will not be so distracting, and I might give the staff meeting another try.

If you've had a positive or negative experience using second life or a similar tool for business collaboration, leave a comment and tell us your story.