IBM Finding Business Uses for Virtual World

jbrodkin writes "IBM has an unconventional take on virtual worlds for business use. Rather than strictly adhering to the laws of physics, IBM is letting its employees hold virtual meetings up in the air and under water. Employees are also being given wacky chores, such as kicking a giant boulder 1,400 kilometers. The virtual world, known as the Metaverse, has been in development for two years. Michael Ackerbauer of IBM says, 'I'd say more people are still finding it a novelty than a business tool. But ... if you build enough tools that they can use, they will come.'" IBM seems to be following a trend of involvement in virtual worlds, which we have previously discussed.

Comments

Whacky chores?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Next share holder's meeting could be interesting?

"So Mr CEO, instead of letting the employees do something useful and making the shareholders some money you have them running around in pixel land kicking rocks? Even Microsoft and Zune makes more sense than that!"

Re:Whacky chores?

[the_humeister]

No, it'll be held in the virtual world and the shareholders will be kicking rocks around.

Re:Whacky chores?

[jacquesm]

Neal Stephenson will hopefully get a big lump of stock in the metaverse.
Probably the end-point of convergence for all the media that we have today is something like the metaverse but I highly doubt if we have the technology to do it today, and that will likely cause a misfire like the early attempts at virtual reality.
This kind of environment either works or it fails, there is no 'halfway there', immersion is not something you do on the cheap or with bad hardware. That just leads to frustration.
It's interesting to see big names like IBM experimenting with this, it could very well be the end of the traffic problem if a fully immersive environment could be produced cheaply enough. Technically speaking the whole worlds commuting budget for office jobs is available for this to be made a reality.

Re:Whacky chores?

[timeOday]

"instead of letting the employees do something useful and making the shareholders some money you have them running around in pixel land kicking rocks?"

Same thing could have been said of the "Word Wide Web" 12 years ago. The browser as we know it might not be the primary interface to the Internet in a decade.

Re:Whacky chores?

[eln]

It's not really about the interface, it's about them doing stupid crap like kicking boulders around or swimming around underwater when they should be paying attention to what's being said in the meeting.

I have no problems with using virtual worlds as a venue for some sort of team building exercise or something, but I don't see how being in this environment would be useful for a meeting where actual information is expected to be absorbed. For meetings at a distance, you need something like the web conferencing tools that already exist, that allow you to present information without unnecessary distraction. If you give your attendees something else to do other than pay attention to the meeting, they'll do it.

Re:Whacky chores?

[tlhIngan]

It's not really about the interface, it's about them doing stupid crap like kicking boulders around or swimming around underwater when they should be paying attention to what's being said in the meeting.

I have no problems with using virtual worlds as a venue for some sort of team building exercise or something, but I don't see how being in this environment would be useful for a meeting where actual information is expected to be absorbed. For meetings at a distance, you need something like the web conferencing tools that already exist, that allow you to present information without unnecessary distraction. If you give your attendees something else to do other than pay attention to the meeting, they'll do it.

For such meetings (they happen?) that the meeting would be engaging enough that there wouldn't be time to kick boulders around. However, in a number of meetings I've been in, I had to participate for maybe 5 minutes then do something the rest of the time. Kicking boulders around might as well be more interesting.

Funny enough, the useful meetings are all relatively short (5-30 minutes). The boring drawn out ones are longer (1+ hours). If my physical presence isn't actually required, I'd do something else. The good ones are telecons where I call in. At least I can put it on speaker and go away doing more productive work.

Of course, if your meetings are such that a majority of people are kicking boulders around, then it's time to rethink the meeting - either break it into smaller groups of people and shorter meetings (with a quick "all hands" as necessary), or find a more disciplined way of running the meeting.

"Dude! You got fired for WHAT!?"

[starglider29a]

"I kicked a boulder 1400 meters... and my boss told me to get serious, so I kicked him 1666 meters."

Oblig

[Eevee1]

World of IBMcraft. Every year, all employees get an expansion pack that lets them become a female elf with bigger boobs.

Cue the requisite...

[Lordfly]

..."More like get a First Life roflburgers!" comments.

I know it's hard to believe, but business DOES transpire in virtual worlds, just like it does in (gasp!) Skype and (double gasp!) AIM.

Mentality

[HandsOnFire]

"if you build enough tools that they can use, they will come"

I've seen so many failed projects happen simply because there was no interest, despite the fact there was plenty of capital investment.

I think things should start with an idea and a goal as opposed to "hey, lets spend a ton of time and energy making this rnadom thing and seeing what happens" It could work for science experiments and I think it's a great thing to do on the small scale, but why take 2 on business meetings in the virtual world?

How about their plans with second life? Has that fallen through? How is this any better?

We go into 3D worlds to provide a sense of space and dimensionality. Works great for games, or going on adventures in a contrived world. One must not forget that most communication, face-to-face, is non-verbal. 3D environments, in my opinion do not provide enough capability to show this facet of communication anywhere near proper. So how would this exactly provide a better place for meetings?

Maybe if it was a group of engineers that said "hey, this would be a really cool idea and help us communicate ideas faster and clearer" then I'd be more sold.

Re:snow crash

[Follier]

"It would be pretty damn funny to see somebody whip out a sword and hack up some IBM senior management avatars"

I doubt that would be the case, as management has a lot more free time to PL and grind teh phat lewts.

Like the Cathy Calendar of Insanity, or the dreaded Cubicle of Holding. Poor bastards wouldn't have a chance.

Re:that's great

[alshithead]

"But 20% of IBM employees are in India."

So? They are an INTERNATIONAL company and have been so for a long, long time. They have employees everywhere. Instead of INTERNATIONAL Business Machines they are often known as "I've Been Moved". As in, their employees get to keep their jobs only if they are willing to relocate. Where were you in the '80s and '90s? My bigger beef is that they sold off their Thinkpad line.

Now, if you want to take issue with Bank of AMERICA outsourcing way too much of their work to India...I'm with you.

Who comes up with this crap?

[dave562]

To be fair I absolutely love Snow Crash and think it was a great book. But come on IBM, get real! Why not invest in some of that nifty Cisco infrastructure that allows you to communicate with anyone anywhere? That seems a lot more productive than logging onto some virtual under water world so that everyone can conference with silly looking avatars.

Virtual? You mean real

[Alwin Henseler]

Perhaps people should be more careful to use the word 'virtual' in an ICT sense. As if the 1's and 0's recorded on your harddrive don't exist, just because they represent imaginary worlds. That is nonsense.

At a critical moment, a miniscule group of electrons may ultimately determine whether a space shuttle makes it into earth orbit, or crashes into the ocean. A tiny magnetic area on your harddisk may determine whether you see a folder with your vacation pics on your desktop, or not. A single bit flipped in transit (due to some electromagnetic disturbance, or whatever) may cause an industrial robot to move a millimeter off the mark & junk the product passing underneath. What I'm trying to say: the environment may be imaginary for a great part, but these small groups of electrons, magnetic area's etc. are very real, and so is the effect they can have.

There's no such thing as a virtual meeting. With 10 participants, that's 10 people communicating with each other at the same time, like in any other real-world meeting. When you're dealing with bots, that's just you interacting with some company's ICT infrastructure, similar to shopping in a webstore or reading /.

Sure, the interface is radically different, but other than that it's just: communication. As creatures have done since the 1st braincell developed.

Business reason for different locales

[Unoti]

The locale, sounds, environment, and general "feel" of a meeting can really impact the way the participants think. We've seen studies here before about high ceilings encouraging open creative thought, while low ceilings encourages disciplined thought. Different kinds of locations can help make the people feel more relaxed, fun, or whatever. Try having conversations with people in second life in different locales and see what you think.

There's some precedent for this. The Disney Imagineering process involves separating development into separate meetings for the "dreaming" phase and "critic" phase. In the dreamer phase, any idea is ok to present, no matter how impractical. In the critic phase, you shoot holes in ideas. Disney would hold the dreamer meetings in open, comfy places; and hold the critic meetings in more enclosed, trashy places. These ideas work in the real world.

Re:Business reason for different locales

[Unoti]

Take my zoo, for example, in Second Life. There's all kinds of crazy things there-- missles that lunach and drop parachuting ducks that throw snowballs at you on their way down, gophers that eat flowers, a giant elephant that juggles people, and so on. People are always in there laughing their asses off, riding the animals around a race track and generally having a good time. There's voice chat, and I can hear them laughing. The environment provides stimulus and gives the people something to do, think, and experience together. Compare that to, say, people watching a PowerPoint in a conference call. There's no comparison-- a virtual environment makes all the difference in terms of people "being" together when they're not geographically together.

Re:Business reason for different locales

[Unoti]

Another example. Today there was a Linden Labs business meeting with 80 or so people. After the meeting, they had a huge snowball fight together-- and many of the employees built their own snowball trebuchets and whatever. Also, lots of the people made their own Christmas costumes.

Some might say "so what" or "get a first life", but those people would likely also say that real life business parties serve no purpose, also. I say it's a good thing-- a bunch of the people have some fun together, they rub elbows with people they wouldn't normally see. The company accountant might actually get to interact a little with the company lawyer or whatever-- the benefits are the same as real life get-togethers.

The Office said it best about Second LIfe

[PrescriptionWarning]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CcxKHjdTQKs

Dwight: "Second life doesn't have winners or losers."

Jim: "Oh, it has losers."

Re:Am I missing something?

[Alpha830RulZ]

If Steve Jobs did it, we'd be cooing about his avante garde leadership. If you were trying to keep your best and brightest people, wouldn't this be kind of a good way to keep those people motivated? Wouldn't demonstrating that your company can do something pretty cool, and not being real uptight about letting them have some fun with it, as part of a major company meeting, wouldn't that be kind of a good way to keep those people happy and possibly more contented and pleased with his place of employment? Wouldn't most of us get at least a little pleasure out of this that probably wouldn't hurt our day job productivity? Frankly, it makes me think about buying their stock.

I've worked for companies of this scale, and one of them did stuff like this to pump us up. Not technology, but similarly unrelated activities. They had Colin Powell come to a global management meeting and speak to primarily the new managers. We played golf. We met, we drank, we bonded. It was genuine, and quite effective team building. It was very motivating to me, and made me think I had one of the best jobs around. I still think that of that time. The company was a private partnership (one of the big Declining Small Integers) and I absolutely believe they got business value out of these things. So did the partners/owners, who paid for this out of their (admittedly tax deduction assisted) own pockets year after year.

Patent infringement

[SamP2]

Employees are also being given wacky chores, such as kicking a giant boulder 1,400 kilometers

In recent developments, Sisyphus's lawyers have announced that their client will sue IBM for business method patent infringement.

Why stop at meetings?

[DrVomact]

Heck, this could do wonders for working from home. You could log into the virtual office on Mount Olympus, levitate to your workstation that is set up on an otherwise inaccessible crag, and do your work. I don't know about you, but I could write great code a mile above the Aegean Sea, with eagles hovering nearby. If people wanted to talk to me, they could always levitate on up to my aerie...as long as their level is high enough to have the Levitate spell, anyway. I'd still avoid meetings, though—I don't care whether they're held on top of clouds or caves full of glowing lava, meetings suck.

There would be some drawbacks, of course: for instance, my PBH would insist on an avatar that looks like Zeus. Ah, no problemo--I'll just hack the system so he looks like Goofy to everyone else...he'll never notice. While I'm at it, I'll make some...er...enhancements to the female avatars.

Seriously, I'm sorta serious. The tech is getting better, and gas prices ain't going down. Sooner rather than later, businesses are going to have to make the adjustment to letting those who have jobs that can be done from home do so.

About the boulders

[jscribner]

As metaverse is an experimental system, the boulder was merely created as part of our development work. We left the boulder in there figuring if we gave users a ball, they'd play with it. We wanted to encourage their exploration of this medium and thereby discover value. Right now, we're entirely focused on getting to the right questions about internal virtual worlds, rather than setting out to immediately seize upon business value.

So far, the boulder has primarily been used to teach employees how to interact and cooperate in the world, but we've been surprised how much it acts as a focal point for people in-world. People are drawn together to play with it, without any direct benefit or goal.

Meetings in Virtual Worlds

[jscribner]

IBM needs a way for its employees to interact beyond the teleconference and to connect across geographies. We've accepted that meetings are an inescapable part of our corporate culture, but we also recognize that shorter, focused meetings will make us more productive. Internal virtual worlds give "I've Been Meeting" (as some affectionately call us) the opportunity to improve on meetings themselves, and experiment with more interactive and effective approaches to them.

Perhaps the most interesting thing we've seen in this environment is that people can't multi-task easily while in a virtual meeting, if they don't give it their full attention they can literally get lost. Conversely, attendees have a shortened attention span, so meetings need to stay on topic and valuable.