There is value in investing real money in the virtual world, despite ongoing economic uncertainty and business scepticism towards the artificial, says research group Gartner.
Gartner VP and fellow Steve Prentice says one field where such investments can make a real, measurable difference, is in training: using the virtual world as a training environment.
"Every organisation has a training budget, and role-playing and scenario-based training exercises are well-established in many fields," he says.
Virtual worlds with strong development tools, such as Second Life, can be used to replicate specific environments such as a retail location or a street scene in which trainees can interact with each other, the environment and their trainers via their avatars.
On a larger scale, substantial virtual environments are being used in training emergency services and military/law enforcement services to simulate real-world scenarios, especially complex scenarios involving multiple agencies, such as biochemical emergencies or terrorist incidents in urban locations, Prentice says.
The ability to stream media into virtual worlds and embed documents into display objects enables trainees to proceed at their own pace to assimilate material, and then interact with each other and their trainers to explore their understanding and knowledge.
The benefits of improved employee knowledge and training can be clearly enumerated, and the savings (or transference of funding), compared with established training methodologies, can be reliably calculated to build a credible and substantiated business case.
Having established a viable presence for virtual-world technology inside the enterprise, Prentice says business can next extend virtual-world deployment to support collaboration and employee interaction.
Examples of successful projects of this type include worldwide product launches involving training, presentations and project planning that eliminate the need to bring employees from multiple locations to a single site, with substantial savings in travel and associated costs and time, says Prentice.
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