Synthesis Studios

Second Life and Virtual Meetings.

I attended the Amazon Web Services developers meeting in Second Life this past Thursday. I’ll admit, at first I was a bit skeptical of the format in general. Aside from the “Woohoo! I’m playing games at work!” factor, I was not sure the benefits of using Second Life would outweigh the overhead. My fears were unfounded; I have been using this format, or something similar to it, for almost sixteen years.

The question may arise as to what sort of overhead I’m worried about. Before I was even able to attend the meeting I had to download and install the Second Life client. If I didn’t already have an account I would have to register one as well. All of this took less time than driving to a meeting in the same city, let alone transporting myself to one on the other side of the country.

My other big concern was if the game-like interface get in the way of attending the meeting. I found that it didn’t. Previous experience in video games lead to a very shallow learning curve with the Second Life interface; the same has been true for everyone else I have spoken to about this. Granted, while launching rockets at your friends requires a different skill set than launching questions at a presenter, many of the mobility and environment interaction ideas carry over.

I think everyone should give this format a try. If Sun Microsystems has their way, it might not belong before meeting in a virtual environment is more than just a gimmick. I’ll be at the meeting tomorrow, Thursday the 27 at 1PM EST on the AWS island, if anyone wants to talk about this. My second life name is Huge Littlething (no pun escapes my grasp).

Tags: Amazon Web Services, Second Life, Sun Microsystems, Wolfenstein 3D

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Synthesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Aaron 2 years ago 1 point
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In this case I think it has less to do with the group size and more to do with the format of the meeting. When interacting with several people on an equal plane, such as in a development meeting, facial expression and group control of a shared medium such as a whiteboard become much more important. After pitching an idea in a development meeting you can quickly poll everyone present by facial expression. You quickly get an overview of their feelings about you idea without a lengthy discussion. Conversely in a meeting with one presenter and several listeners, having a disconnect between yourself and your avatar can be beneficial. My participation in the meeting did not require me to find a quiet spot to set up a camera and audio device. I was still able to ask question and participate, but did not disturb the meeting when my phone rang.

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Michael Ducker 2 years ago 1 point
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For small groups (4-7 people?), are there advantages of virtual meetings through avators vs. a group video chat possibly coupled with an realtime whiteboard/document sharing system?

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