Why You Should Have Your Next Business Meeting in Second Life

EnlargeSecond Life

EnlargePhilip Rosedale

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Second Life, the virtual reality site, is reaching out to a new audience: businesses. SL is seeing an uptick in traffic for business meetings, conference calls and classes -- and that's welcome news for a site that has long struggled to retain users.

How much of your traffic is business and education users?

Our estimate is it's in the 15 to 20 percent range right now of overall usage. But it's very hard to say because the world is this very open environment and it's difficult for us to survey it. Second Life right now is just a little under a million hours of use per day and a little bit more than 200,000 different people using it. When we talk about those percentages, I guess that means tens of thousands of people using it for business and education.

Which companies are using it?

IBM and Cisco are both heavy users or virtual worlds, and specifically Second Life. IBM in particular has been a real innovation leader, using Second Life aggressively for a couple of years now. On the order of a thousand people came to a multi day virtual event in which Sam Palmisano, their CEO, spoke from a recreation of the Forbidden City in Beijing. Obviously, with the concern about the ecological impact of business travel today, as well as increasing fuel costs, the savings are very substantial for businesses to have meetings in Second Life.

What makes the virtual world attractive to business users?

There are two features we've added in the last year that has made Second Life attractive to both business and education. The first one was the ability to use 3D voice. If someone is on your left and someone else is on your right, you hear them on your left and on your right. You can't do this with a speakerphone, you can't do it with most videoconferencing systems and you can't do it with Skype.

The second thing we did is add richer features that enables people to browse the Web. You can sit around the table in Second Life with a bunch of colleagues from remote offices and one of you can show a presentation, a PowerPoint or a Web page, up on the wall in the virtual meeting room.

The virtual world creates a sense of realism that's way beyond what you can do with two-dimensional whiteboarding or a Web conferencing application. Admittedly, it's a little harder to get set up, and that's our challenge.

One of the criticisms of Second Life is that people visit out of curiosity, get bored and go away. Is this a way to draw more users?

We are still very early in the functionality and adoption of virtual environments in general. The majority of people who try out virtual worlds -- and Second Life is definitely the leader in that overall category -- don't stay. They try it for a short time and they're either unable to get started, or they don't find the kind of experiences they're interested in and they don't come back. But that's the same thing that happened with the Internet during its early years when, for example, search didn't work as well as it does today. People would give up before they found the content they were looking for.

What we tend to see in Second Life is a very small number of people staying. But when they find something interesting -- like for example they're able to use it for business meetings -- they really enjoy what they're doing and tend to aggressively stay.