Virtual Worlds – Will Probeck

Virtual Worlds for Business: Virtual business conferences and meetings have suddenly become  very popular due to the cost of travel and many companies restricting employees travel budgets. The question asked at my association is – can we eliminate a few face-to-face (F2F) conferences and replace them with virtual meetings? It really is a no brainer from a financial standpoint. We can eliminate a number of out of state meetings realizing a savings of about $50,000 and perhaps initially investing $2500 to test our virtual worlds platform. But the really important question to ask is will the members accept the new  virtual technology when they are so used to the F2F  meetings?

The Plan: We have planned to roll out our plan slowly, starting with testing the VW with internal meetings and then adding additional external people to the mix. Once we are successful showing that the virtual meetings are educational, useful and as well as a huge cost savings, we have made inroads to actually designing an real meeting with 20-100 people attending.

As a result many small as well as larger companies are looking into the cost of holding virtual confrences. As we indicated in the voicethread presentation 1 there are many companies using virtual worlds to hold vendor trade shows, conferences and meetings. Many of these companies are very expensive and only designed for companies with large budgets.

Much research has gone into finding an appropriate vendor that we can test the technology without spending a lot of money that we don’t have to invest at this time. I have discovered two that fit our needs:

• Virtual Beginnings
• GoWeb3D (VRWorkplace)

You can listen to the presentation detailing these two companies below or click on the images above and take a self -guided tour of each. Either way you should be impressed with the differences between these two vendors and Second Life.

Cost of Doing Business
I have spent a lot of time researching many of these virtual platforms. My initial research excluded 6connex, unisfair and inxpo due to cost of doing business. As I have said their business model is for larger companies with bigger wallets. So, I focused on smaller platforms that were suited for training and business meetings.

 What follows is my brief review of Virtual Beginnings and Goweb3d.  If you are interested in discovering more information about the virtual trade shows, here are the links for 6connex, Unisfair and INXPO. Here is also the unisfair_pricing of getting started with Unisfair. If you go to their sites you can download white papers and other information. They ae well worth the time and effort.

Virtual Beginnings
I discovered them by attending one of their virtual meetings. There were issues with VoIP so everyone had to switch over to the phone. I have attended a few other meetings since  and they have gone smoothly. I requested an individual tour with Steve Parker and discovered many more aspects to their platform and its many uses for meetings, vendors and conferences. Their platform is built in active worlds. As you can see it is a lot easier to navigate and get started than Second Life. I think they would be a perfect second step in getting members of an assoication or whomever involved in virtual worlds. If your audience is more tech savvy than most then this might be where you start. By comparison they aren’t that expensive. They are easy to work with and very accommodating. See attached PDF on pricing (PDF).

GoWeb3D
I found Dave Elchoness by joining the Association of Virtual Worlds. To my good fortune he is located in Boulder. His concept is to use 3D web technology and make his platform friendlier, greener and way cheaper than the competition. His design is a web-based platform with nothing to download. All the user has to do is go to a URL, click, log in and walk to a meeting. Whatever is on your computer you can share with someone else in another location. You can share videos, PPT presentations and web sites, etc. This is a great entry platform to get started in virtual worlds with very little expense. Dave wants people to have a good initial experience and then move into more complex customized sites. The initial investment is around a $100 a month. As of now there is 20 person limitation per site but you can have multiple sites.

If you have any additional questions, please submit them here or in the CU Denver Discussion Forum.

Go Virtual and get a Second Life!