Second Life is essentially an interface, an advanced way of communicating with and through a computer network. It is no surprise, therefore, that the early business participants have been consultancies and communications companies.
PA Consulting Group, for example, last year constructed a virtual campus using architectural elements from its London headquarters, its technology centre in Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, and its offices in Copenhagen.
Claus Nehmzow, the group’s virtual world’s expert, says the original objectives were twofold: to provide a marketing tool complementary to the company’s existing website and real-world marketing operations and to help with recruitment.
“We thought there might be a better response because the audience would be more inclined to use this kind of technology,” he says.
The first iteration was basic – just an office outline with exhibition-like stands to provide information – but Nehmzow says important lessons have been learned already: “You might think that 3D is just a pretty version of 2D, but it turns out that it is much more than that.
“In three dimensions you can see, in a non-threatening way, whether somebody is looking at a particular piece of information in a way that is impossible in a two dimensional image.”
The company also discovered that the presence of “real” people is important: now it employs “greeters” globally and around the clock to welcome virtual visitors and point them towards the information they want.
Nehmzow describes “meeting” a potential recruit in the office one day, flying him over to the auditorium to view a number of company presentations and finally connecting him by phone to one of the group’s experts: “Over 20 minutes, I probably spent only three minutes engaging with this person but we escalated all the way from a multi-media web experience to a real-life phone call. It was very cost-effective.”
Aedhmar Hynes, chief executive of the international public relations group Text 100, runs a company steeped in technology. But when she proposed to her executive team early last year that the company should become involved in Second Life she was met with amazement: “Some people clearly thought I’d lost it at that point,” she smiles.
Ms Hynes persevered, however, and in the middle of the year, with the creation of the Text 100 island, it became the first global PR company to establish a presence in Second Life.
The financial outlay was modest: the aim was to explore the frontiers of the new communications methods made possible by technology.
“Social change is being enabled by technology rather than the other way about,” she says. “We were prepared to spend a lot of time exploring the implications. The island is our dip in the ocean. If we were going to advise clients about virtual worlds we had to experience them ourselves.”
Despite initial scepticism, the concept took off rapidly and is already being used for education, collaboration and innovation within the company. It recently held its first worldwide conference involving 30 offices across the globe. Ms Hynes recalls that each office entered into the spirit of the fantasy, dressing their avatars in clothing appropriate to their geographical location.
Clients are being introduced to the idea by way of a guided tour of the island: “We will either advise clients on developing their own presence or they can use our Second Life office for their purposes – they could hold a press conference there, for example, or try a new way of product demonstration for their staff or clients.”
Sun Microsystems, a leading manufacturer of computer hardware and software, is another company that has decided to experiment with Second Life to understand – according to chief gaming officer Chris Melissinos – “what is going on in terms of the next mode of communications”.
The company hosted the first Fortune 500 press conference in the “Sun Pavilion” in Second Life late last year, an event attended by 60 avatars including journalists, software developers and Sun customers.
Mr Melissinos attributes the popularity of Second Life among young people to the influence of Japanese video games: “While adults were trying to work it out, kids on their own found Japanese pop culture. Second Life is a different kind of communication but completely natural and obvious to people who have been playing games for a long time.”
He points to the high probability that within a decade or two there will be a US president who grew up playing Nintendo games.
For Sun, the chief advantage of the virtual world is the ability to create a product – new computer hardware, for example, and test it to destruction in Second Life, then allow potential customers to give it the same treatment.
Its view is shared by Mr Nehmzow of PA Consulting Group, who says that virtual worlds may not have the functionality of a dedicated computer-aided design system, “but their ability to share the look, feel and functionality of products and services globally in real time and at minimal cost is unrivalled”.
While Sun offers customers the ability to examine and study its products in its pavilion, Mr Melissinos is adamant it will not do commercial business in cyberspace – at least, not yet.
The problem is security. Second Life is self-policing but the technology remains vulnerable: “I’ve never seen a kid take a scripting language [a simple language used to designate how one computer communicates with another] and accidentally write a script that will cause the entire internet to crash,” Mr Melissinos argues.
“That does happen inside Second Life – so Second Life is not the second coming of the internet.”
