Acquiring a professional "second life": problems and prospects for the use of virtual worlds in business

Authors:
Katherine Bessière;Jason B. Ellis;Wendy A. Kellogg
Affiliations:
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA
Venue:
CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2009

Citing 3
Cited 7

Community Support for Constructionist Learning

Computer Supported Cooperative Work - Special issue on interaction and collaboration in MUDs
Games for virtual team building

Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems
Distance matters

Human-Computer Interaction

Exploring the workplace communication ecology

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Virtual world professionals and avatar appearance codes

Futureplay '10 Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology
Me and my avatar: exploring users' comfort with avatars for workplace communication

Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
A means-end analysis of consumers' perceptions of virtual world affordances for e-commerce

INTERACT'11 Proceedings of the 13th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction - Volume Part I
Participation framework(s) in Second Life meetings: communication media and roles

Proceedings of the 29th Annual European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics
Future InfoExpo: the future of information seeking & services exposition in Second Life™

Proceedings of the 2012 iConference
Evaluating PresenceScape: a 3D virtual world application to support social awareness and informal communication in distributed teams

Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The current surge of interest in virtual worlds suggests they are poised to make an evolutionary leap to the workplace, as instant messaging did a decade ago. In recent work we have introduced dozens of new users to teambuilding activities in the Second Life® environment, meeting both enthusiasm and skepticism. We document five issues for professional users of virtual environments: initial motivation, technical difficulties, interacting competently, becoming socially proficient, and finding compelling activities. Based on these we describe a training strategy to enable professional users of virtual worlds.