FUTUREVIEWS, May 2009
As companies grow more complex in an
increasingly dismal business environment, Virtual Worlds will provide a
number of opportunities to solve a growing list of business concerns.
From our perspective, the “killer app” for Virtual Worlds resides
somewhere in area of immersive learning and virtual rehearsal. In other
words, what if you could rehearse every business strategy you ever
thought up in a world where the environments, the interactions and the
objects themselves could know their own status in the context of the
proposed business strategy? We have already done ERP deployment
rehearsals in virtual worlds, where a deployment plan’s breaking point
could be traced to the individual part, Bill of Material or supply
center. This is because all these elements could be programmed to
be “intelligent” and “know” when their manufacture, shipment or assembly
was not in compliance with the desired outcomes.
Below we outline some other ways in which
Virtual Worlds will be essential for growing businesses.
Concrete Abstraction
In many simulation models, complex abstract
organizational forms such as workflows, supply chains, and ERP systems,
can only be understood through numbers, databases, spreadsheets and
basic computer representations. Virtual Worlds afford a new set of
possibilities to represent these previously abstract forms in concrete,
albeit virtual, physical forms. These virtual representations can be
interacted with, manipulated, rehearsed and tested in ways that were
previously not possible. Also, the kind of expertise that was required
to decipher these complex organizational forms can be more easily
understood and shared. Just as basic computing was made “user-friendly”
by the “Windows” and “Mac” platforms, Virtual Worlds allows the
expertise required to understand these once abstract systems to be more
widely available. Furthermore, Virtual Worlds also allow users to
connect real world objects and virtual objects in ways that can be
tracked and manipulated. For example, you can build a full virtual power
plant that exactly replicates a real power plant. The various
controls, like temperature, pressure and other indicators can be hooked
up to the real world plant. An avatar can then go into the virtual
buildings and do safety checks without ever having to go visit the
actual plant.
Rich
Remote Collaboration and Rehearsal
The ability for large organizations to
coordinate and rehearse strategic initiatives has become increasingly
critical as organizations expand globally and must rapidly refocus
strategies to match changing global business demands. These demands
require not only multiple entities spread over vast geographical
distances to share information, but the kinds of information that need
to be shared make increasing demands on software capabilities,
bandwidth, and collaborative complexity. Virtual worlds exponentially
enhance the kinds of complexity demands that will become more and more
common in the coming years. Multiple users can be co-located and engaged
together in intricate shared activities with the same kinds of shared
artifacts they were they physically co-located. As such, use of
virtual worlds can replicate a rich work environment, while drastically
reducing the cost of participation by minimizing overhead for building
and maintenance, no overhead in terms of travel, and no time lost due to
travel.
Extending the organizational brain
Virtual Worlds have a unique potential to
dramatically extend the cognitive tools that can enhance learning,
training, and rehearsal. Virtual Worlds achieve this by affording
user-created collaboration tools with highly social capabilities,
immersive environments, design flexibility, granular metrics tracking,
and “smart artifacts”. Smart artifacts, for example, allow users to
track and send information about their behavior, respond and adapt to
new information, and communicate with other objects, users or even
systems in order to document activity. For example, as a “worker”
is engaged in a simulated task in Second Life, the objects he or she
interacts with can send information to remote sources or back to the
worker indicating the success of the task and other forms of immediate
feedback on performance to both to participants and remote observers.
With the ability to have smart environments, 3D Virtual Worlds afford a
degree of granularity in the metrics that cannot be achieved in real
life. This allows participants to adapt and respond better to critical,
time-sensitive issues and receive acute information as to the ways in
which they may be deviating from target outcomes.
Below is an example of an OpSim™ we developed
for Sales Agility Training, using the Second Life Virtual Worlds
platform.
CASE
STUDY: The FutureBlu™ Sales Agility Simulation
As with many new technologies, people have
had a lot of high expectations for Virtual Worlds. While Virtual Worlds
showed some initial successes, many users have been disappointed,
because Virtual Worlds haven’t yet been able to generate the kinds of
revolutionary applications that we all know are possible. In particular,
businesses haven’t been able to extract the kind of value discussed
above. After looking deeply into the kinds of industries that can
benefit greatly and immediately from virtual worlds technology, WTRI, in
a partnership with the BlueMineGroup, has developed FutureBlu™.
FutureBlu™ is a sales agility training simulation that allows sales
people to encounter various real-world sales scenarios in an immersive
Virtual Worlds environment.
When we were interviewing sales experts as
part of the initial research for FutureBlu™, interviewees registered
frustrations with traditional techniques. While these techniques were
seen to be useful as general exercises with helpful tips on better sales
practices, didn’t really translate to the real world performance.
Furthermore, as sales people moved beyond the “novice” stage, the
trainings had diminishing returns. The primary reason for this is that
traditional techniques rely on sales rehearsal without context. And,
these trainings cannot simulate the kind of nuanced and more extreme
scenarios encountered by experts, relying on general stage models and
rules of thumb. In contrast, FutureBlu™ allows participants to
experience immersive, real world sales scenarios that capture a variety
of situations, business context, time stress, portfolio management and
competition with others. Participants also receive immediate,
invaluable feedback on various performance metrics.
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To read a description of a FutureBlu™ simulation, click here.
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To visit the FutureBlu™ website click here
RESOURCES
Virtual Worlds simulation exercise helps reduce PTSD among Iraq
veterans.
Article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/19/080519fa_fact_halpern
Video:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2008/05/19/080519_halpern
Comprehensive academic overview of Virtual Worlds’ implications for
cognition and computing. Dourish, P. (2001). Where the action is: The
foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Doing
Business in the Virtual World – article from eweek.com
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Doing-Business-in-the-Virtual-World/