Go Climb a Tree

Mega-advertising agency Leo Burnett has concept and design staff in 83 countries, and improving connections among these remote locations is exactly what it has in mind for its Second Life “ideas hub,” expected to open early this year.

The aim, says corporate affairs associate Abby Lovett, is to create an “art school lounge” atmosphere for its 2,400 “creatives” around the world, bringing them together to share ideas. But instead of designing buildings and boardrooms, the agency's Second Life space will be a “fantasy-inspired apple orchard.” The idea was “not to create another company Intranet,” Lovett says. Rather, she says, it will be a place to meet and share ideas. “It's an opportunity to be inspired outside our own four walls.”

In addition to serving as a gathering point for the company's creative brainpower, Leo Burnett plans to extend several face-to-face events into the virtual space. Its Cannes Prediction Events will be among the first. In May, before the Cannes Advertising Festival in June, the company rents theaters in several cities and brings in local clients and employees to view a reel of the year's best advertising created by Leo Burnett and its competitors. This year, the video will also be shown in Second Life, bringing the event to a much broader audience.

Similarly, a presentation on risk-taking marketing ideas created by Leo Burnett and Contagious magazine was shown at several marketing industry events in 2006, and the hope is that screenings in the new orchard will continue conversations on the topic through 2007.

New Media Campus

When the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation held a press conference in New York in October to announce a $50 million investment in digital media programs, Second Life avatars were in the audience. A video of the event was streamed in real time to a Second Life amphitheater, where about 65 avatars watched. The New York audience could see pictures of the SL gathering, and the avatars were able to e-mail their questions.

The meeting space was on the Second Life campus of the Austin, Texas-based New Media Consortium, a 14-year-old, not-for-profit group of nearly 200 universities, museums, corporations, and other organizations, including the MacArthur Foundation, that are interested in applying technology to learning and creative expression. NMC opened a major campus in-world in April 2006, and since then has held hundreds of events there. NMC's CEO Laurence Johnson, PhD (aka Larry Pixel) says NMC has approached Second Life as a research project. “We've had two-person meetings, three- to five-person meetings, brainstorming meetings, mostly presentations. … We've experimented with playful meetings, formal meetings, and everything in between. We wanted to find out how it was different. It's fundamentally different.”

Comparing Second Life to 2-D Web meetings, Johnson focuses on its immersion qualities. “If we meet in Second Life, it changes the interaction. You extend yourself into your avatar.”

Among the notable meetings at NMC's virtual campus have been the Symposium on the Impact of Digital Media, which attracted 1,300 people over the 12-day event, which included “live” keynotes, panel discussions, and presentations; the opening of an art exhibit; two press conferences, live music feeds (with avatars “performing”); the announcement of winners of a Second Life photo contest, and much more.

Johnson predicts a lag before the corporate world in general buys in to the idea of 3-D e-meetings. “What we're doing is really two to three years ahead of when people will consider it seriously.” He notes that managing feedback and interaction in a Second Life meeting is still an issue, and the learning curve and technology requirements can be a barrier. Laptops typically don't have the power to deal with the simulations, and using “anything less than a cable modem is a not worth your time,” he says. In Second Life, users typically need to spend five or six hours getting to know the system — registering; getting an avatar; learning how to walk, sit, fly, teleport, chat, and so on — before they can effectively attend an event. But many people are impatient, Johnson says. “People will show up [at a event] and the first thing they'll ask is, ‘How do I turn around?’”

Virtual Education and Beyond

Despite the challenges, NMC's campus is going strong, with plans to expand in 2007 from 16 acres to 112 acres, adding a theater complex and a life sciences/medical complex, among other facilities.

Creating educational simulations is envisioned for the new medical center, a subject near to the heart of Lawrence Miller, PhD (aka Lorenzo Stork), director of Continuing Medical Education at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine-Chattanooga. Miller is consulting on the design of NMC's new virtual trauma center, but he's also hard at work creating his own Second Life continuing medical education event on hypertension in diabetic patients, which he expects to hold by June at the latest.

With a grant from Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Tennessee, Miller has a design firm building patient avatars that will be able to display a variety of vital statistics. Plans for the course are still evolving, but one idea is for doctors (as avatars) to interact with patient avatars, asking questions and gathering data. Then, guided by medical librarian avatars, the docs would jump into Web environments specifically for healthcare workers in order to learn better research techniques as they determine a patient's diagnosis and treatment. Miller says he is working hard to use the virtual capabilities to their fullest and not replicate what can be done in a face-to-face environment.

Miller's career has spanned a variety of learning technologies, from slides to podcasting, and Second Life, he says, is the logical extension. Miller says medical residents and faculty show interest when he makes presentations about Second Life, but the response from medical students is, “It's about time!”

“Once we get past the technical issues, this [virtual environments] will be a standard way we do a number of educational things,” Miller says. “We need to be ready for a different world. We need to start learning how to use this environment now.”

Second Life is hot because of the economy that has evolved — generating business opportunities and media attention — and because of its community of artists. The landscapes, architecture, and art are stimulating and creative. But observers agree that Second Life is just start of the 3-D Internet, where people can connect globally, visually represent their ideas, practice skills, and have fun.

“There will be more virtual worlds,” predicts NMC's Johnson. “I'm anticipating competitors — many more.” In a few years, he says, new systems will develop with fewer operating constraints, and broadband will be more advanced.

But for now, forward-looking organizations such as IBM are jumping in to test the potential of online, immersion communication. “Second Life is a playground,” says IBM's Chuck Hamilton. “For us, it's been one big experiment.”

Look Who's Virtual

The Second Life 3-D virtual world was launched in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Labs and has seen explosive growth and media attention in the past six months. At press time, more than 2,835,000 people had created an avatar for themselves to walk, fly, and teleport from space to space. About a third of those “residents” had logged in to the world for some amount of time in the previous two months.

Unlike most other online worlds, SL is user-created, using the construction tools Linden provides. Residents retain the rights to their creations. Linden makes its money by selling land to residents and by charging land owners monthly fees (basic membership is free). Residents control their assets and can buy and sell goods and services using Linden dollars (which can be exchanged for real-world currencies).

If a 3-D online community seems a little too silly for the corporate world, consider just a handful of the many mainstream organizations that have jumped into Second Life: