Perhaps it is a sign that the age of the Metaverse has finally come when two major corporate players decide that it could be useful to them as an internal tool.
Both Sun Microsystems and IBM have distributed workforces in offices across the globe. They obviously need to comunicate with one-another and personally, the phone doesn’t work too well for me. These days, videoconferencing is a credible option but Sun and Big-Blue seem to feel that a 3D, avatar based collaborative environment offers more.
Ian Hughes of IBM UK leases a private island called Hursley in Second Life for development of 3D environment ideas and concepts but Big Blue is also developing an in-house metaverse based on the Torque 3D engine. The internal metaverse already looks quite asthetically pleasing, probably by virtue of the engine in question. (When oh when will SL’s render engine be brought up to date?)
IBM’s SL Branch office, part of their Second Life presence.
Sun has also developed an in-house metaverse known as MPK20 built on top of their Project Darkstar server infrastructure and Project Wonderland rendering engine (which somehow manages to look more dated than SL’s render engine at the moment).
3pointD writer Mark Wallace who has an extended piece on MPK20 notes that Sun has integrated Sun Labs Voice Bridge to provide VoIP (or should that be ViMV?) support to enable direct voice communication between users (via their avatars).
Personally, having experienced many virtual environments, I’m not sure how they could really enhance distance working as they still seem somewhat cumbersome to use for complex tasks. That’s not to say that this situation isn’t likely to improve.
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