The Workplace Blog

A few days ago I attended a talk at the London School of Economics on globalization and how the European Union needs to respond to it. The talk had a couple of high profile speakers like Anthony Giddens (who coined the term globalization back in the early 80s) and Neil Kinnock the former labor party leader. But fascinatingly, it was broadcast live on Second Life, the 3d online digital world.

And not only was it broadcast live, but participants sitting in the Second Life auditorium could ask questions too.

The room in which the talk was held had two large plasma screens that showed the virtual conference and its participants. Sitting in the actual room I could look at my fellow audience members - both the physical and the virtual ones. Granted the screens were often a distraction but after a while the audience got bored looking at the screens and focused on the speakers itself. Having my laptop with me, I logged onto Second Life so that I was both in the physical and the virtual talk at once.

A couple of things struck me about the Second Life piece. At the most obvious level it allowed a lot more people to participate. Secondly, linking the virtual and the physical together by enabling physical audience members to view the Second Life talk and vice versa (the online viewers were getting both audio and video feeds) enabled people who couldn’t be physically present still make their presence felt. More talks like this will result in many of us updating our Second Life avatars to look more presentable. And finally, it also made the speakers aware that there was a broader audience listening, something that they’d easily forget if the talk was simply being video recorded for later broadcast.

So what does all this mean for the enterprise? Second Life can present a novel way for virtual company and team meetings. Given how much knowledge workers travel, Second Life can be more personal and engaging than conference calls but less complex than video conferencing. Do you think this has a chance? Personally, I think it will be a few years before Second Life enters the corporate mainstream but I could be wrong.