Applications and Tools, Business in Virtual Worlds, Second Life, Virtual World Platforms

Immersive Workspaces: Industry Standard Review

The Industry Standard has a review of Rivers Run Red’s Immersive Workspaces application, and it gives a nice overview of the application itself. In my recent interview with Justin Bovington, we touched on the business use cases for the application, discussed the fact that it is hosted ’separate’ from the main Second Life, or public Grid, the concept of ‘living landscapes’, amongst other topics.

But the Standard fills out the other part of the story, which is the application itself:

“Companies using Immersive Workspaces don’t need to build anything — the default product comes with a private corporate sim that includes a lobby area, a conference hall with 60 seats, and several meeting rooms that can hold 20 avatars at a time. The meeting areas can display multimedia, PowerPoint presentations, video, and audio files. A workspace can be accessed through a Web portal, an emailed slurl, or an in-world invitation. Appointments can be set up on the website, and integrated with Outlook or iCal.

I was able to meet Browning in the private sim, view a presentation on one of the display screens, and carry on a long discussion in the auditorium and one of the meeting rooms (see screenshots below). Browning and I barely used text chat to communicate — Second Life’s live audio was fast and clear, and sounded much better than a telephone conference call. Even though we were on opposite sides of the country, it sounded like she was speaking in the same room.

For those of us used to SL, it will come as no surprise that “there were some glitches.” Whether those glitches are common behind the firewall, I have no idea - the demo version of IW is, I believe, on the Main Grid and isn’t hosted any differently than any other sim.

They didn’t comment on the recently launched Mobile Ripple application, which allows posting text (and in the future video and audio) notes to the Immersive Workspace environment.

Justin Bovington will be the guest on Metanomics this coming Monday. In addition to giving an overview of IW, it will be interesting to hear Justin’s thoughts on how he feels this contributes to the broader health of Second Life, and perhaps what other features he has in store.

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