Do Better Business in 3D

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Vouching for Virtual

Here are just a few applications we've seen from other organizations:

At the University of California, a professor of psychiatry is using Second Life to simulate and experience schizophrenia in an effort to more deeply study and understand the disease and how to best treat those afflicted with it. The Centers for Disease Control has created virtual clinics to train emergency workers who might be called to rapidly set up medical facilities in a national crisis.

And other organizations are developing prototypes to explore what might be possible. For example, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has built a simplified oil rig to demonstrate how virtual worlds can help in the development of education and workflow optimization of process-based industries.

Early virtual worlds such as Second Life have demonstrated that these highly visual, immersive environments satisfy two key aspects of being human: our innately social and visual natures. As these worlds become more integrated with the current Web we will see a transformation in business—both in how consumers interact with business and how employees inside of businesses interact with each other and broad communities.

Open Standards

To reach this future, we need to take some immediate and bold steps to ensure these platforms are viable for future use and development. Open standards must emerge so these virtual worlds connect and to ensure users can cross from one world to another, just like they can go from one Web page to another on the Internet today. We also need to better manage trust and identities to solve or mitigate many of the challenges that we face around illegal actions, inappropriate behavior, privacy, and security violations. It is clear that trust and identity management are base requirements for the equitable creation and transfer of business value.

For any meaningful impact on business and government to occur, it is also apparent that we must leverage the current business applications and data repositories—integrating these core mission systems into our virtual worlds, be they Web-built, Web-enabled, or legacy systems. This is mandatory for the widespread adoption and rapid dissemination of business capabilities. This integration will require the leverage of open standards and the significant reduction of interoperability challenges.

Finally, we need to aggressively drive the creation of more—and new—business applications to release the business values that can be accelerated by the use of these virtual worlds. The technology may not be perfect, but it will continue to improve. And the application to business and society will be limited only by what the best and brightest can imagine. It may not be an overnight "Eureka!" moment, but it will certainly be fun.

Parris is vice-president of digital convergence at IBM Research.