A Wider Net

Sue Pelllitier brought this up in her Face 2 Face post last month. Corporate Planners Unlimited, Inc are launching Virtualis - a massive virtual convention center in Second Life. See this press release.

I have yet to tour Virtualis, but this sounds very interesting. While any company has the ability to create a meeting space of their own in Second Life, there’s something to be said for booking space in a well-established and well-equipped meeting space (sound like the real world much?)

Combining this meeting facility with the voice chat capabilities enabled by Vivox, Inc, where you can “talk” through your computer to other people in Second Life simply by “walking” up to them and talking into your microphone, you have a unique virtual meeting space with great potential. I’m still very skeptical that it’s ready for prime time, however, due to ongoing infrastructure problems with Linden Labs that make access to Second Life with a large group of people a hit-or-miss proposition, insane firewall requirements to enable voice, and a rather undefined set of support technologies for webcasting, archiving, measurement, and content sharing. Second Life simply wasn’t built for this purpose.

My hope is that enough people find this convention center appealing that it inspires other companies, maybe even the existing virtual event companies like Unisfair, to offer a new solution for virtual events featuring proximity-sensitive voice, 3D environments with real-time avatars, integrated live presentation support including live flash streaming, and better navigation. I would like to see someone focus on a purpose-built solution for business that learns from Second Life’s hits and misses.

In the meantime, I look forward eagerly to Virtualis and will report what I find.