When I regained consciousness in the conference room, I was naked. Fortunately, I still had my wallet . . .That's not a nightmare about making a speech at work, or a warning about the dangers of mixing tequila and meetings. It's what actually happened when "Welchito Apparatchik," the avataror online graphical representationof this writer, attempted to attend a meeting in Second Life a few weeks ago. (Because of a glitch in the program, Apparatchik's clothes failed to download, except, bizarrely, for a wallet chain.)
What is Second Life? Unless you just got back from three months in Borneo, it's hard to have missed the barrage of press coverage about this three-dimensional online virtual world (think "The Sims" on steroids). But the big news about Second Life isn't that there are now three million participants, or that at any given moment, 20,000 users are onlineor even that a growing number of people are earning real-world livings by making and selling virtual products on Second Life. It's that household names from IBM, to Harvard, to Starwood Hotels, to even Congress are using it to hold press conferences, training sessions, classes, product launches, and other events.
"What's unique about Second Life is presence," says Donald E. Jones, a graduate student at Georgetown University who is writing his master's thesis on Second Life. "Instead of doing a virtual meeting on the Web, where you'd just see a list of names of attendees, with Second Life you actually see a body"in the form of an avatar"next to you. There's a sense of being there with other people, which gives you a totally different experience."
What's more, anyone can join. Just register and download the software online at secondlife.com, choose an avatar name and appearance, and go. The basic membership is free.
But it's not for the fainthearted. As with many things Internet, the environment is predominantly social, not to mention risqué; the times this writer logged on, for example, typical exchanges between online users included "Your hairs are beautiful" and
"J'ai envie de toi" (that's French for "I want you"). But for cutting-edge organizations, those wanting to attract younger or more tech-savvy audiences, or early adopters looking to get in on the ground floor of what will almost surely become ubiquitous technology in the near future, it's essential to check it out. Read on to learn why.
The Rules of the GameLast November, Samuel Palmisano, the CEO of IBM, became the first major corporate executive to appear in Second Life, when his avatar (appearing onstage in an online re-creation of Beijing's Forbidden City) announced that IBM would be investing $100 million in virtual business ventures. But that's hardly the technology giant's only use of virtual reality: Chuck Hamilton, who spearheads Big Blue's endeavors in Second Life, leads training sessions and orientation meetings for IBM's new hires who would not otherwise be able to come together.
Clad in a virtual kilt and appearing online as "Longg Weeks," Hamilton took Welchito Apparatchik on a recent tour of the boardroom where IBM's new employees meet for the first time. "We're hiring people from China, India, Brazil, Russia, so it's often not economical or feasible to bring them physically to IBM for their first orientation session," Hamilton explains. "So as an experiment, we're using Second Life for them to meet virtually first, exchange ideas, ask questions, go look at some IBM spaces, and generally get familiar with the company."
IBM's virtual boardroom looks like a real boardroom, complete with a table and chairs where avatars sit, talk, and watch videos and other presentations together. Participants communicate via the "chat" feature, which posts written comments on the screen for all present to see, but if people want to talk privately, they can use the "IM" feature to directly contact one another without others reading their posts, and without interrupting the main discussion.
Besides practicality and cost savings, Hamilton sees numerous advantages to doing such meetings online: "There's a sense that you're actually at the meeting. If I stop moving my mouse, eventually my avatar will slump forward, and the other people in the room will say, 'Hey, Chuck, are you still there?' " he says. "If I have to get up from my computer, my avatar can leave the virtual room. When I come back, people can say, 'Welcome back. We were just discussing such-and-such.' "
The written language used in Second Life get-togethers has advantages over spoken language, believes Claus Nehmzow, expert on virtual worlds at PA Consulting Group, a London-based management consulting firm that advises its clients on how to use Second Life as a business tool. "Especially in international settings, [writing] can be much easier to understand," he observes. "We've also found that if [communication] is via text, the threshold to speaking up is much lower. That helps open up communication." In other words, a Second Life meeting might shift the focus away from the glib, gabby types who tend to hog the spotlight in real-life meetings, thereby allowing for a whole new dynamic in online gatherings.
Who Are You?Second Life confers a relative anonymity that also encourages openness, say experts. "Studies have shown that people are more honest with their opinions in [virtual] spaces because their identity is somewhat protected, so they can take more risks," says Georgetown's Jones. "If I'm standing in front of you, I'm picking up on your body language and other clues that might prevent me from being as honest as I could be. Also, we judge people by their appearancewhether we want to or notand in these spaces, we're judging them by their avatar's appearance, which isn't the same thing, because it's something they have control over. So it levels the playing field in some ways."
Contrary to the popular image of video games as dominated by teenage males, Jones adds that Second Life resonates strongly with women. Indeed, when female participants are interviewed about their Second Life experience, they say that they like feeling "less pressure from being a woman in the workplacethat in Second Life, they're judged more by what they do and what they're able to do," says Jones.
One such woman is Nanci Schenkein, a retired event planner from Roseland, NJ, who signed on to Second Life nearly four years ago when there were only a few hundred members. Shortly after joining as the avatar "Baccara Rhodes," Schenkein partnered with "Fey Brightwillow," a digital-clothing designer (believe it or not, Second Lifers pay real money to clothe their avatars in fashionable digital outfits), to create the online planning team Spellbound Events.
"We came up with this idea of doing an event that would knock everybody out," says Schenkein. That turned out to be a recreation of
The Wizard of Oz in which participants started out in a black-and-white Kansas replica and traveled down the yellow brick road and over the rainbow, transforming themselves into Munchkins and other fantasy avatars along the way. Schenkein's next project was an even bigger event replicating Neverland and the Peter Pan story; it took up three "sims," or simulated environments, and got written up in
The New York Times, establishing Baccara Rhodes as "the doyenne of events in Second Life," according to Catherine Smith, spokesperson for Linden Lab, the San Francisco-based creator of the 3D world.
"People love instant gratification and anything visual," says Schenkein, explaining Second Life's appeal. "Instead of looking at a plastic model of a new hotel, say, on Second Life they can walk through it, see how it will look and how people will interact with it." (This is precisely why Starwood launched its newest brand, Aloft, in Second Life long before any physical hotel existed.) And attendees "love" virtual meetings, Schenkein adds: "Instead of just having people get together over the phone, you bring them into this virtual space, where they actually sit at a conference table. It's incredible."
The idea of leading an online life that is more exciting than the off-line version is also key to the appeal, Schenkein notes. When she helped facilitate a recent conference for
Popular Science magazine, she used actual photos of attendees to design avatars that looked like them, only better: "I designed all the avatars to be glamorous, with fabulous clothes and shoes. A lot of the attendees were women, and they were so thrilled to see a 'them' that wasn't their workaday self." Attendees also enjoy blurring the line between work and play. "When the meeting's over, a lot of people go on to enjoy a 'second [social] life.' "
A Third LifeDespiteor perhaps because ofthe hype surrounding Second Life, the platform has several limitations. At present, each "island" or sim can support only 50 avatars at a time; firms like Sun Microsystems and IBM must have multiple islands in order to host press conferences and other large-scale events. Service can be excruciatingly slow and full of glitcheslike those naked avatarswhen many users are logged on. ("If you're doing a meeting in Second Life, don't do it on a Wednesday," warns Georgetown's Jones.) More recently, complaints about anonymous pranksters, dubbed "griefers," who crowd public areas or cause other disturbances, have sparked discussions about the need for more policing in an environment that some observers have compared to the Wild West; however, it is unlikely that this would be a problem with meetings, since organizations would presumably limit invitations and attendance to people they know.
Second Life is the definite leader in the Web 2.0 arena (the latest Internet iteration allowing for user-generated content and social networking, as with MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and other popular sites), according to meetings technology guru Corbin Ball. In fact, he first identified avatars as a trend back in 1998 when they appeared on a website called Activeworlds.com. Even so, he sees limitations in their use for meetings: "Avatars are great because you can be someone else, but when establishing a business deal or relationship, you don't
want to be someone else," he points out. Virtual events can play a role if used to promote a live event or as a follow-up afterwards, but Ball believes that the future of interactive meetings technology lies instead in high-definition videoconferencing tools that will one day allow meeting participants to look each other in the eyevirtually, at least. "In another 10 years, we'll probably have videocasts that are so high-definition you'll be able to tell if the other person shaved or not," he predicts. "Compared to that, avatars will seem last century."
Second Life's potential to promote travel and hospitality was, at presstime, drastically underutilized: Starwood's Aloft site was unavailable whenever this writer logged on, and aside from the first virtual embassycourtesy of Swedenthere was little in the way of destination promotion. But imagine visiting a virtual convention & visitors bureau in Second Life, something that will surely exist in the near future: Planners could walk into a remarkably realistic 3D rendering of the convention center, submit RFPs for their meetings, teleport to off-site venues, watch a video of the bureau president extolling the importance of meetings, and so on. Of course, the experience can't serve as a substitute for an in-person site inspection, but it could help planners narrow down their choices.
As for the virtual world's unbusinesslike ambiance, Linden Lab's spokeswoman Smith points out that it's unlikely that people attending a professional event would choose avatars depicting themselves as "furries," surfer dudes, or devils. Yet they could still take advantage of the fluid nature of Second Life identity: "As my avatar, Catherine Linden, I look like myselfan idealized version of myself," says Smith. She adds mischievously, "But I do have a Wonder Woman costume I like to put on sometimes."
Sidebar: How to Meet in Second LifeTip #1 Make sure a virtual meeting is right for your groupdon't use it just because it's a cool tool, warns virtual-meetings expert Mary Boone. (Some attendees might be offended by some of the content.)
Tip #2 Find a space. Eric Rice runs Hipcast Conference Center in Second Life and rents it out to planners at a base rate of $150 per day.
Tip #3 Prepare attendees: Have them download the program (free at secondlife.com), choose avatar names and looks, and experiment so they know how to move, sit down, chat, and teleport to the meeting site.
Tip #4 Be aware of certain peculiarities: If attendees break too long from their computers, their avatars will slump forward. And don't do a meeting on Wednesday, which is the site's busiest day.
Sidebar: Only the Fee Is RealWhat would it cost to hold a meeting in Second Life? We asked Mike McAllen, CEO of Grass Shack Events & Media. He's headquartered in Oakland, CA, but does so many events in Second Life that he opened a virtual office there.
SM asked McAllen to price out a virtual conference for 40 people, using a conference center and incorporating golf or other off-site activities. His answer? It could cost anywhere from $0 to $5,000 for something basic, or from $5,000 to $20,000 for something high-end. Why so much variation?
"In Second Life, we don't have costs for insurance, workers' comp, catering, hotel, or air," says McAllen. "But we do have land costs and avatar costsjust as in real life, you're paying for manpower and design." How much that'll cost you depends on a variety of factors: "Do the pieces of the event need to be created, or can we buy already-made items as solutions? If you're using a brand-new conference stage, for instance, it'll take time to design it."
The "build," or conference site, could be permanent land purchased from Linden Lab (creator of Second Life) and used to hold repeated events, or it could be rented for a one-time conference. Permanent sites are expensive: A private "island" measuring 64 virtual acres, for instance, costs $5,000 plus $780 a month.
Just as for a real-world conference, there would also be costs associated with sending out invitations, designing an agenda, AV (video and audio streams, for instance), and staffing, says McAllen. For example, if a conference space is to be peopled with greeter-avatars who can answer questions about the organization holding the meeting as well as about Second Life, those avatars would need to be run by real peoplewho would need to be paid.
Sidebar: The ABCs of AvatarsBasic avatars on Second Life are free and can be can be altered (skin tone, hair color, eye shape, weight, etc.). For something more glamorous or outrageous, you can pay extrain "Linden dollars," the local currencyfor unique features or accessories. An avatar that actually looks like you will cost from $200 to $600, says virtual-event planner Nanci Schenkein, known in Second Life as "Baccara Rhodes."
Second Life has its own unit of trade, the Linden dollar. Residents use their Linden dollars to pay for goods and services provided by other residents.
Exchange Rate:
(at closing of market on 2-10-07)
L $269.8 = US $1.00
Web Extra: Who Needs Second Life?It had a virtual component, but the conference that meetings-technology expert Mary boone organized in February at New York City's Asia Society didn't use Second Life.
Click here to find out why