Virtual Worlds Conference: Trends and Numbers

3pointD reports from the field:

"Steve Prentice of Gartner Research: We’re pretty much where the Internet was in the mid-90s. People are interested, but they don’t quite know what to do. Describing it as a media channel is probably one of the most accurate ways of doing it.

Corporates are starting to understand that this is a channel that needs to be used along with everything else. But they’re still isolated islands. You can’t yet move your avatar or your assets from one world to another, That’s one of the constraints. There’s only one Internet. Once you can move from one to another, the growth you see today will look pretty stagnant.

There’s a great tendency to think about commerce, but one of the biggest opportunities for larger organizations is to create community within the organization. We see the VW not so much as a community space, which it is, but also as a collaboration space. Its an incredibly powerful tool.

When you’re actually having a meeting in a virtual environment, they can be much more involved. For a lot of large organizations, the opportunities lie to better improve their communications and sense presence. It’s like fooling people that they’re actually there.

Interesting thing about 3D space is you get to see what the other person sees. You get that sense of being there, it’s a very powerful attribute. Nothing to do with commerce, has to do with oiling the wheels inside large enterprises."