My old ritual for giving a live presentation in your typical conference setting: clip on the microphone; try not to trip over the wires on the floor; transfer my presentation to a thumb drive; load it up on the late model PC laptop on the podium; make sure the resolution looks good on the screen; make sure the recording is on; make sure my remote works; go!  What a pain in the hind quarters!  Practice makes perfect; you learn and adapt.  I  also learned what to do when things go wrong; for example, when the resolution on the screen makes your graphics unreadable by 90% of the audience and you people squinting and tilting their heads.

As the global economic downturn took it roots and blossomed into a full fledged financial meltdown, organizations began looking for ways to cut costs.  The most infamous techniques involved downsizing (layoffs) and other headline making measures.  At IBM, one of the casualties of the economic downturn has been “non-revenue generating” travel.  The frequent visits to colleagues in different sites for the sake of meeting face to face have been going the way of the dinosaur.  When a customer or partner is involved, I am convinced that there is no better company in the world than IBM at facilitating whatever the customer or partner wants – face to face meetings, etc.  However, from a cost savings standpoint, it makes sense to reduce or eliminate discretionary spending, like travel, whenever possible.  For the past couple of years IBM has been experimenting with virtual worlds as a way to conduct business with high fidelity interactions between people in geographically distributed locations, but without the side effects of travel expenses (including time lost while traveling).  A recent example of IBM using Second Life to facilitate large scale meetings was featured in Virtual Worlds News.  Irving Wladawsky-Berger also blogged about Serious Virtual World Applications where he discusses some the success stories IBM has had with virtual worlds and what it takes to make them successful.

I recently had a first hand encounter with a conference held in Second Life (SL) where nearly 200 participants gathered to hear a presentation “in world”.  At IBM, we have created our own internal worlds in SL customized to host these types of gatherings.  In this particular meeting, I received a link via email that teleported me away to a virtual auditorium that reminded me of a Roman coliseum.   The auditorium came fully equipped with a monster sized projector screen and seats that oriented your avatar to the screen when you sat down.  Next to the screen was a stylish podium where the speaker’s avatar waited to give his presentation.  As the presentation began, the slides were rendered on the screen and audio was streamed through my computer’s speakers.  At first, the audio was barely audible, but later a moderator sent a message to the group saying we should get closer to the avatar that was presenting!  What? Perhaps this is a little too real.  I am used to this kind of issue in real world presentations at conferences: there are some good seats and some not so good seats.  Sometimes the presenter speaks too softly, sometimes their slides are hard to read from the back.  I never expected this type of issue in a virtual world, however the creators of SL apparently think some of the real world’s physical limitations make sense in their virtual environment.  This got me thinking: what can my avatar do in his virtual world that I can never do in the real world?  While some of the real world physics are baked right into Second Life, its fun to think about the ones that are not and what one might do in a world where you can teleport, or fly, or create and manipulate matter like it was silly putty!  While this might lead to some interesting presentations and amazing real-time collaboration (think collaborative 3D whiteboard), I also wonder if my avatar can be smarter.  What if my avatar could act as an intelligent agent, listening to the presentation and grabbing interesting bits and pieces of information for me, then creating a summary and posting it as a You Tube video so I can watch it later?  I could even send an army of smart avatars out to multiple presentations at the same time all with instructions to collect, analyze, and aggregate information that I find useful.  Hmm…smart avatars, I wonder if this fits in the Smarter Planet strategy somewhere?

While I am still skeptical if virtual worlds will ever replace real human-to-human interactions, there is certainly something to be said about the potential for innovation within an environment where real world physical limitations are removed.  Who knows, perhaps one day with practice we will all learn to adapt to the “in world” experience and attending a virtual conference will be as normal as dialing into a conference call.