The Virtual Office

When I think most of us are in a TN frame of mind we tend to think of virtual worlds as only games or social spaces. The concept of work when it does come into play tends to do so in the sense of its traditional boundaries being challenges by a shift in the consumer / producer divide or in the sense that is is entailed by the pracitice of gold farming.

So here in a bit of a novel and experimental move for us is an essay on the subject of the Virtual Office by Andrew W. Donoho who is Web Theorist in the bit of IBM they like to call Emerging Technology. Responses to to the questions that Andrew poses and the very inclusion of the discussion of the virtual office as a topic on TN are welcome.

The Virtual Office: A Holy Grail or Attainable 'Reality'?

The virtual office (VO) is a dream of human interface/virtual system researchers for many years now. Yet, the VO seems as far away as ever. Yes, we have hours of entertainment in fabulous virtual worlds, such as the World of Warcraft, Second Life and others. But how do we transition out of the entertainment spaces and “get some work done” in VOs?

In my day job as an emerging technologist for IBM, I see the misapplication of technology to the human problems of organizations all of the time. Therefore, since the technologies for building VOs are now being commercialized by Second Life and others, I ask myself if it is going to be different this time? My analysis starts with performing an inventory of technologies and workplace challenges. I then offer a simple economic scenario for implementing a VO. A description of the social issues precluding VO acceptance is next. And I conclude by soliciting the opinions of Terra Novans on the problem.

Technology Inventory:

1. High performance, commodity priced graphics hardware.
   
2. High resolution screens.
   
3. Pervasive, low cost motion video cameras.
   
4. Modest broad bandwidth connections.
   
5. Second Life as a sample VO construction toolbox.
   
6. Effective network office infrastructure (Web, IM, email, etc.)

The above list is a pretty standard inventory of the state of broadly deployed technologies. I include Second Life because it is available, has a demonstrated track record of being able to support office level avatar densities and has an open architecture. Because this list is not terribly controversial, I will not examine it further in this post.

Rational Workplace Challenges:

1. Lead, overwhelmingly obvious application that VO solves.
   
2. Low cost alternatives.
   
3. Networked Abstract Office v. Virtual Office.

Because the decision to implement a virtual office is made by businesses and not individuals, it will frequently start with the above 'rational' issues before proceeding to the softer social issue examined below.

Social 'Drag' - the resistance to novel organization of social systems.

1. Social structure of business life.
   
2. Boundary between the personal space and business space.
   
3. Company culture.
   
4. Training.

Social drag will slow and frequently stop much innovation in organizations. It can only be overcome by the steady application of sound micro-economic logic of business savings over time. Let us look at logic.

Rational Workplace Challenges:

The 'killer' or traction application is normally where these kinds of analyses both start and stop. I contend that there is no specific application that a VO solves that will call it into being. A VO is a systemic economic entity that reduces costs so much that it overcomes objections to its use.

Therefore, the VO has to offer a better economic solution than the reigning paradigm of the Networked Abstract Office (NAO). The NAO is that collection of technologies that we use for the day to day communication and control of our various business activities - phone, email, web browsing, IM and, to a much lesser extent, blogging. This office exists in the participant's minds and they navigate it relatively well. Bearing in mind that most NAO users only use the most rudimentary capabilities of their tools, the productivity of the interpersonal communication they enable overwhelms the cost of deploying many of these over engineered technologies. Since many of these tools will be common between a NAO and a VO, they will not be a differentiating factor. Yes, they may be represented differently in a VO but, because humans have already adapted to using NAO tools, they will not offer much economic advantage. Emerging from this analysis is the very clear idea that the VO is a superset of the NAO.

But what kind of superset? Is it an avatar based world? A 2 and 1/2 dimensional view of a desktop? What is the real roll of a first person perspective in an office setting? I think all of these questions are improperly technology driven. Office life and productivity enhancement is about communication. Therefore, any VO is going to have to have rich communication at its heart. Because of the pervasive availability of motion video cameras and broadband, I think the real driver will be the deep integration of live video of the VO participants. Anyone who has seen a multi-person demo of Apple's iChat AV senses the power of this kind of integration. Yet, it is still reasonably difficult to set up a multi-person AV chat.

Therefore, my lead scenario for calling a VO into being is as follows. As a response to an energy crisis, large organizations wishing to avoid compensating employees for travel to offices will put in place the server infrastructure to host home office employees in a VO. As this proves successful, in a positive feedback loop, employers will start shifting more of their employees to home offices and releasing high priced office space. The savings to organizations is large - avoided employee raises to compensate for increased transportation energy costs and the reduction in rent for mundane office facilities. These avoided costs dwarf the costs for high priced, high bandwidth networks into homes, fancy VO capable desktop PCs and supporting servers. The savings are there. The precipitating event to cause businesses to reevaluate this situation has not yet occurred. Furthermore, there are no products currently available which implement a workable VO. The pieces are there. Will anyone put them together?

Social 'Drag':

Humans like other humans. They like being near them, going to lunch, conversing and working together. In this regard, the VO starts with a real disadvantage. Since I am a home office worker, I have intimate familiarity with the feelings of isolation that can occur without daily human connections. There is a social structure of office life that humans benefit from. (I get my social outlets elsewhere but I can easily see this as a large scale problem if VOs get established.) While a VO can address this isolation somewhat, a VO is starting out with a huge hurdle to acceptance. This is very different than entering a virtual world (VW) for entertainment. Presumably you see people at school or your real office and the VW is a temporally limited affair with impressive eye candy, modest engaging puzzles and social chat. A VO would be your daily grind (and not in the sense of how many mobs you kill today). The social structure of business life is a serious impediment to VO adoption.

There is also the problem of the boundary between personal space, e.g. your home office, and your formal business space. While I am odd that I invite business people over to my home office often for meetings, I expect most people would not do so. Therefore, the VO has an opportunity to migrate formal space into the virtual realm. To keep it separate from the personal realm. Because of the tight video integration, there will be some leakage between the spaces. (For example, I used to have a cockatiel that would squawk during teleconferences.) This problem is manageable but we will also have to recognize that many employees do not have dedicated home workspaces. There will be some appropriate employee pushback on shifting these home office costs onto employee shoulders.

Company culture is very difficult to overcome. For example, many large companies have very advanced teleconference centric culture. This culture has developed over years of having geographically far flung venues. This culture is somewhat of a culture shock to new employees. In contrast, many companies still 'live under one roof'. Their culture requires face to face meetings. A teleconference is not a 'real meeting'. I have had to frequently fly in to their site to, in fact, cause folks to meet deadlines. These cultures are durable. A VO can probably pretty easily take root in a teleconference culture company but whither in a face to face culture company. Therefore, VOs will probably first start being deployed by large companies.

Finally, training is a real cost. It is one of the major reasons that most organizations do not use most of the features in their current suite of office productivity tools. Fortunately, VOs should be able to leverage the rapid learning features demonstrated in virtual world systems. But, this will be a real objection from the social realm driven by real costs. We cannot ignore them.

Summary:

The odds are against any VO actually getting deployed and used. Yet, the technical and infrastructure pieces are basically in place to make VOs broadly available. The integration of live video is probably the last required piece of technology to make VOs possible. There is an economic case to be made for their deployment but is lacking a precipitating event to start the shift. The social drag slowing and stalling acceptance will be huge. In other words, like office productivity tools themselves, a VO may take upwards of 20 years for our society to figure out how to use it.

Questions for the Terra Nova Community:

1. What else, if anything, do you think is a technology prerequisite for a VO?
2. Does my communication centric view really trump the technology driven approach?
3. If not energy, then what would prompt the creation of a VO? (Bird flu is too transitory, in my opinion, to cause the investments.)
4. What, if anything, do you think should be added to the social analysis?
5. Do you agree that the social structure of business is probably the biggest impediment to VO adoption?
6. And, of course, what suggestions do Terra Novans have for me as I navigate this application area?

by Andrew W. Donoho.

Comments

[bloo]

1.

A "bit of a bit"? Nice.

[bloo]

2.

In a less-proofreading-critical mode, the Virtual Office is unnecessary. I've been involved with two 'virtual corporations' - no real offices at all. IRC, Email, Telephones, Shared FTP, Subversion, done.

I don't see any need for a 3d virtual office space. Certainly not one that would justify the effort required to create and maintain it.

A Shouts: "ANYONE KNOW WHERE THE REIMBURSEMENT WEB WEB FORMS ARE?"
B Warns: "zOMG stop Shouting of I'll kick you!
C Whispers: "The reimbursement form is in the Hall of Accounting, in the back. Take a left at the Golden Abacus, jump over the Red Tape Worm Pit. Open the bottom drawer of the File Cabinet. But you'll have to get a key first from the Giant Bean Counter. Otherwise, you'll agro the guards and they're elite level."
A says: "thx m8"
A winks at C.

[ren]

3.

>A "bit of a bit"? Nice.
Got it - thanks.
I should have said that I did the formatting so any errors there will be mine.

[bloo]

4.

I would have edited my comment after reading it. But, gremlins of poetic justice put 4+ errors in my second comment. :)

[Travis Ross]

5.

Andrew, I doubt I should be considered qualified to answer your questions (still in grad school, so I ask a lot of questions but don’t provide many answers :D ). However, I ironically was just writing to my blog about the very same topic.

I was wondering if virtual worlds could be used as VO's to decentralize the workspace. Like you mention the office is a place where social interactions are mixed with the transfer and management of information. When you take away the social interactions that occur at the workspace, then often production/learning are lost due to isolation. Are virtual worlds a medium that will allow us to bring down the social boundaries that we currently experience when decentralizing with other ICTs? I don’t think they are yet, but they definitely offer hope and a ton of questions. I think our current virtual worlds (like other technology) will be effective for some things, but still can’t justifiably replace the office. One major limitation of virtual worlds still being the inability to portray many of the social cues (body language)we do in everyday life. What would a VW provide that can't be provided through Telephone, IM, Web, and email? a Anyway, sorry I don’t have much to give, but I wanted to thank you for your post and I am excited to read the results.

Travis

[John Liu]

6.

I can't help but think back to the times when I worked as a creator in a mud (years back). Login (daily), work on new code or areas, check & compile the object and load it into the game.

I have what essentially is a work place:
1. all my code is on the server
2. my tools are on the server
3. I have 'offline' copies of the code on my computer, but they are just like photocopied materials from RL office that I take home / read on the bus / highlight and make notes
4. my 'colleagues' (fellow creators) are on the server, to a degree, socializing with them also occurs on the server (with godlike powers we can clone beers too).
5. in my RL work, I work mostly in solitude because I need to be quiet to think, occasionally, I get up and walk around, chat with a few colleagues to relax, or I ask a colleague or two about a particular problem they might have some insight about. None of these things I couldn't do when working on the mud.

Even if we throw out the mud background, and focus on any software project being worked on by people in different parts of the world... Throw away the mud channels/tells/emotes for socializing and replace those with IRC.

Essentially we ended up with what most open-source projects look like.

Probably a problem is the 'agreed time to work'. IRL,
I get annoyed when I need to ask a colleague regarding something, and he's away on holidays - because I am now held up on my tasks. If VO's operate on a come as you like, leave whenever you want, it may be really hard to track down a piece of the puzzle that someone else know about.

2c

[Trevor]

7.

Leaving aside the discussion of whether a gold farmer in WoW is already working in a VO, the most interesting part of Andrew's list of existing technologies is that it indicates that we're to a point (technologically) where small groups of people with limited startup funds can simply try the concept instead of debating its merits.

[Andrew Burton]

8.

This could also factor greatly into future out-sourcing debates. Why fly to India when your avatars can just talk with them across time zones.

[John Beety]

9.

Perhaps the Virtual Office progression will be faster than anticipated. The first step to making the Virtual Office a reality is increasing acceptance to the concept of the Virtual Office, and indeed of Virtual Worlds in general; while few TerraNovans would have real difficulty envisioning a Virtual Office, it would take quite a bit for my parents, for example, to be comfortable with the concept. Much has been made of World of Warcraft as the "new golf" among certain cyber-enthusiasts. As social acceptance of virtual worlds as games grows, it is possible that synthetic-world games could become more popular among business types, and more normal. Of course, acclimation is only one possible path to the virtual office, yet it seems to be among the most plausible. It would be a strange path to implementation, though, to pass through the golf course, if you will.

[Hellinar]

10.

Andrew> What else, if anything, do you think is a technology prerequisite for a VO? <

I think the critical technology element is making the remote communication link superior to the face to face one. A couple of examples:

Video Link Out: Don’t send a picture of me as I am, but as I would like to be. Comb my hair and slap a suit on my image on the way across the Net. Replace my real office with a more impressive version. SL is partway there in that, but my movements need to be captured and translated by a camera, not input with a keyboard and mouse.

Video Link In: Annotate the incoming image with information I might normally miss. Point out the John is getting annoyed and Sue is bored. Remind me that Mike has another meeting to attend in ten minutes time.

Opinions: Allow anonymous opinions and suggestions. Sometimes we pay too much attention to who said it than to what was said.

Those a few things that come immediately to mind. But the main point is, as long as electronic communication is framed as the “cheap alternative” to face to face, people will feel deprived when they use it. Make it the deluxe way to communicate, and it will be widely adopted.

[Michael Chui]

11.

The idea of a virtual office seems superfluous at best. What exactly makes it better? What problem does it solve? It's all very nice to say that we can make a cool technology, but -- and I'm being quite serious -- what's the point?

If you can answer that question, I suspect a lot of other questions can be settled at the same time.

I'm not saying it's not a good idea; I'm simply pointing out that it needs work, as an idea.

[Cenn]

12.

OK. I might be able to talk sensibly on this.

I work for a smallish software company with lots of international customers. We have small offices in 3 different cities, and HQ is in another country. I manage projects and personel in anywhere from 3-5 different countries at once.

I couldn't do my work with IRC, Email, teleconferencing, etc. I am on the phone for 3-4 hours a day, on irc pretty much all day.

Its interesting to note that the "upper management" is often the slowest link - they need their face-2-face meetings and papers signed etc etc. The development and support teams can often get thigns done so much faster via irc.

The biggest advantages of a VO i would see is the integration of various tools into one package. Right now I need to have my phone, outlook, IRC server, CM tool, lots and lots of emails open, firefox, ms project, and a whole slew of other products open at once.

Having a single interface which allows sharing of information and files while also chatting is a good thing - it would help immensly.

One of the biggest problems is document sharing/management - also things like "virtual presentation/modelling tools" would be awesome as well.

[Andrew Donoho]

13.

Let me summarize the points made so far:

1) Bloo is a very funny guy/gal - 'Red tape worm pit' is a fabulous image! Also, s/he defends the Networked Abstract Office (NAO) as sufficient. Let me be clear, I too find the NAO sufficient. But there are plenty of employees in modern corporations who just don't 'get it'. They are concrete thinkers and not abstract thinkers. We need them to be productive too. Is the VO a solution here? (Corporations have invested huge amounts of cash in training to modest avail.)

2) The 'agreed time to work' is a problem that transcends VOs. VWs need schedules for raids, groups and other events. (My WoW guild once held a cross faction dance party in the arena in Org.)

3) The low cost of entry into this area is part of my interest - an emergent use of game tech. Most of the costs in this area are not in the code but in the deployment. To that end, we will have to "build it to see if anyone comes".

4) The idea of augmenting reality with explicit body language analysis is very interesting. In RL meetings, I find many people bringing their laptops so they can not really 'be there'. It allows them to be plugged in to other spaces while partially ignoring the meeting they are in. Unfortunately, this rudeness is quite common. Would an automated analysis of a VO meeting participant's attention level actually improve the quality of a meeting? A kind of 'be here now' kick in the pants?

5) Michael Chui's challenge is somewhat curious because I commented that the odds are against the adoption of a VO. I posited in the article an economic justification and scenario. In direct answer to his comment though, the VO is a mechanism that allows a business to replace a real, expensive office by shifting the cost on to employees (also avoiding the need to additionally compensate employees for increased commuting costs as a result of an energy crisis). If these savings are real, then some organization will try to capture them. This discussion has also raised the idea of using a VO for outsourced situations.

6) Cenn rhapsodized about an extension to his NAO. With the integration of VoIP into the desktop, we have brought the last legacy technology into the world of maleable bits. The challenge will come from merging the local client into the VO while also allowing alternative access modes (mobile, laptop).

Overall, the comments are confirming one of my theses that that the NAO will be difficult to augment. The outsourcing idea combined with body language analysis may be a real lever to improve cross cultural communication in organizations.

Thanks,
Andrew

[Brask Mumei]

14.

I find it interesting that transport costs are being used to justify a switch to home office from workplace. Rather than decentralize (and, as a result, pave even more farmland with spreading suburbia paradises that require cars to do the grocery shopping), one could centralize. I would suspect public transit could save an order of magnitude on energy costs.

Let's say our VO dream comes true. I can live anywhere then, right? So, being a normal human with a love of green spaces, I spread out. Of course, now that there aren't convenient clusters of humans, it is uneconomical to provide public transit. It is uneconomical to provide a grocery store in walking distance. We have actually increased the reliance on private transport rather than decreased it!

Back to the main point: What would a VO be? I'm afraid I'm part of the skeptics. I'd see a VO, if anything, be a convergence of the current NAO into a more unified interface. Google Talk is a good example of this - I can instant message, phone, or email with one interface. I can also search my IMs and email without having to do multiple searches.

I am optimistic about human adaptability. The poor training response that is seen currently is, IMHO, largely because the would be learners don't see it as useful.

[AJ]

15.

I think a big thing that's missing in virtual/abstract offices is the ability to "look over someone's shoulder". In a real office, if you want someone's help with or comments on something, all they have to do is walk over to your desk, then they can point things out, see what you're doing as you do it etc. This is currently quite difficult to achieve with the tools we have, you either have to broadcast your screen or use a collaborative application. A lot of the time the usual method is to send static images or a copy of the work, which is really no better than communicating it through sending a fax. It should be as easy as moving your avatar/view close to your colleague's, or clicking on a representation of their screen or something and should provide realtime information of what you are doing and way to direct people's focus as easily as pointing to something on your screen with a finger.

[AJ]

16.

Oh, they should be able to take control of the application and data you're using as easily as if they were at your RL desk too.

[Gerret Peters]

17.

A VO need not be appropriate for all industries, of course. Some work will of course always need to be conducted "IRL" - for example, work involving production of physical artifacts, like buildings.

Of course, the architecture and project management functions could be performed in a VO, and I can clearly see the benefits of directly walking through virtual representations of the building as part of daily activities. Overlay those with actual progress on the building, and quality inspections become immediately available to your entire team, not just the inspector.

Although isolation from social contacts might be an issue for some, most people have real life contacts. In addition, the fidelity of the VO might help offset the effects of such isolation.

Killer technology? Immersion.

[Ken Fox]

18.

I telecommute about 4 days a week for a large (400,000+ employees) manufacturing company. We mostly use e-mail and traditional phone teleconferences, but IM and other collaboration software (Microsoft SharePoint) are becoming popular.

AJ: In my experience, it is easy to ask for help -- shoot off an e-mail to a mailing list. It's also fairly easy to keep up with what others are doing and collaborate. What I miss most is the serendipity of seeing a presentation from outside my job function or overhearing a conversation in the cafeteria. It's also much, much harder to understand the people I don't directly work with because I don't see their work spaces or their projects.

Brask Mumei: Why live close to the building your boss works at? I'd rather live close to entertainment, food, good schools/universities, etc. Job mobility shouldn't depend on physical mobility -- I want the same advantage as the "off-shore" guy I'm competing with.

Andrew Donoho: Traffic congestion (time wastage) and life style choices are probably the main factors for employees. Cost avoidance, employee retention and productivity are probably the main factors for employers. I think we need a triggering event to switch to the VO, but once there, it will be impossible to switch back. Terrorism, energy crisis, economic depression, or privacy requirements (avoidance of the State) could be triggers. Honestly, I don't really want to experience the trigger to get to a VO...

Michael Chui: The VO would integrate all the NAO tools. Frequently I have to ask someone who they are when I haven't heard their voice much -- somtimes in the same conversation -- because it's harder for me to recognize a voice than remember someone's face or physical location at a table. It would be fantastic to gesture while listening to give feedback to a speaker. Speakers could also use gesture to support the talk rather than interrupting the talk with meta-data. I use shared whiteboards now, but it's a hassle negotiating who has control of the mouse. Perhaps the VO could provide some of the serendipity that's missing from the modern NAO.

Andrew Burton: I work with people in India and it's a major pain in the ass. One or both sides end up sleep deprived and/or working without feedback. Managing a team in both places is very hard. I've never seen anyone quite pull it off. The only reason it works at all is because a US company can afford a 100% productivity drop when combined with 200% lower cost. The VO wouldn't help this at all unless you also put all your employees into a virtual timezone.

[Ken Fox]

19.

Gerret Peters: Telepresence provides better results I think. Even if the architects work only 15 minutes from the build site, they probably won't be there as often as the contractor would like. Robots are to the stage where they could navigate a construction site and send wireless audio and video (and even 3D data) back to an architect using a virtual world.

[Michael Chui]

20.

Andrew...

Right, this is true. But perhaps framed another way, the question is, why is an application that simulates an office superior to broad spectrum of other office automation and online collaboration systems? Can't you achieve everything you want without the cameras, the massive usage of bandwidth, the construction of a virtual space, etc.?

The only response to that that I can think of is AJ's comment -- that it's useful to look over people's shoulders. But you can achieve the critical portions without very much fancy technology.

[AJ]

21.

Coming from a graphics background, I don't think it is that easy to do the looking over the shoulder thing with current technology. Let's look at some examples:

It's all well and good when the person you're helping knows what they're doing inside out and all that's required is commenting on a design (although, incidentally, I've found this to be a lot quicker working in Second Life than sending renders from a 3D app), but that's not always the case. Walking someone through aspects of production over the phone or by IM is nowhere near as easy as being there. You can't see if they're just missing one little thing and so have to go through all the steps to get there, something that's not always easy to remember when not doing it.

You've got to remember that not everyone's great at describing what's going on too, several times I've given up and we've met up RL to see what's going on or it's reached a point where it's quicker to do the thing myself and send it through than actually figure out what's going wrong at the other end.

Some things, such as particle work, also require a video to be sent - which either requires rendering it out or capturing with a screen cam application and encoding - which slows things down immensly if you're working together to achieve just the right effect and are flipping variables about to see the effects they have on your system. Once we actually resorted to pointing a webcam at the screen, which is far from ideal.

Thinking about virtual offices, is a messenger contact list not a very basic version of this? Would it not be better to intergrate the functionality required (such as decent collaborative software in my case) and approach the building of them that way rather than head straight for a goal we don't even know exists, let alone what it looks like? I think if there is to be a migration to virtual offices from raeal ones and NAOs it's something that will present itself as a logical step, rather than something that's going to be forced. Although it is fun to think about, especially the implications of it for uses of augmented reality.

[Giff Constable]

22.

bloo's post is funny but perpetuates this notion that a virtual office will attempt to entirely supplant 2D with 3D. 2D and 3D both are useful, but for different tasks.

If you need something between text or a disembodied voice (weak relationship building) and the rich connection you get by being face to face (very strong relationship building), then technologies like video and avatar-to-avatar based interaction become very useful. Business is fundamentally about human relationships, so the kind of technology we need is one that can help people form better relationships even if physically distant.

[Eric Random]

23.

Is spatial representation the only difference between the VO and the NAO? If so, what advantage does spatial representation provide?

Take out VO and VO-centric specifics, and the paper works just as easily with NAO.

Although NAO's as VW's may not make much practical sense, NAO's with VW-based tools could, or further, pseudo-VW's used as user-interface modules for an NAO product suite. For example, VW-based conference rooms, classrooms, or presentations, or a graphical representation of an organization chart that also serves as a virtual office space layout (pseudo-vw). Perhaps not in the manner of SL, though, as spatial scale and representation can vary between such tools for functional efficiency, as well as the number of methods of content channelling and functional representation. That is, virtual worlds can vary drastically depending on function.

Although spatial organization is important in physical office design, spatial existence is necessity, and thus requires spatial organization. For example, coffee stations near restrooms, and central leisure and eating facilities to facilitate diverse corporate interaction and team-building. In a VO, when I go get coffee, use the restroom, eat, or seek leisure space, I am away from the VO equipment. Spatial organization within a spatial representation in such scenarios is moot.

There are many standards, processes, and tools that could be added to an NAO that could, potentially, drastically increase productivity for both in-office and tele-commuting modes. Many of these, though, are very specific to the business. There is, clearly, a set of these that all businesses rely upon, and currently, most businesses and users implement these ad hoc. Perhaps one should start with a design of NAO business standards.

What else, if anything, do you think is a technology prerequisite for a VO?
Highly dependent on the particular function and implementation of the VO.

Does my communication centric view really trump the technology driven approach?
Our current ad-hoc manner of meeting our tele-commuting needs with easily-accessible technology is probably the biggest obstacle. There seems to be real confusion on standards of social engagement and professional virtual etiquette that has held strong for almost 10 years. Business standards, that are functional. technological and social, must be well understood prior to wide-spread use of virtual office space. Further, never underestimate the security issues that are created with mass tele-commuting structures. In offices, computers are owned by the company and many company resources stay on company premises and can be secured. Remote access is normally considered by security groups as unsecured.

what would prompt the creation of a VO?
The movement to telecommuting today largely has occurred because technology used inside office spaces. As the office spaces become redundant with the tools provided, people move out of the offices. If a VO becomes used as standard office software within office spaces, it is only a matter of time before the office space melts away.

Do you agree that the social structure of business is probably the biggest impediment to VO adoption?
The biggest impediment to widespread VO use is probably security, both virtual and physical. The second is high variation in functionality and customization requirements. There is great variation between jobs in the same company on whether or not specific labor can be virtualized. The bottom rung would be the social aspects of it, as social welfare of employees may not be of high priority in business anyways.

what suggestions do Terra Novans have for me as I navigate this application area?
What functional advantages does spatial representation provide for the application? This seems more like a solution looking for a problem, rather than a problem looking for a solution. One cannot look at just the social limitations of the NAO and prescribe the VO. There are limitations and advantages to NAO, limitations and advantages to VO, and limitations and advantages to physical office space. Further, such implementation is highly case specific. Personally, I would continue along a path of general NAO business standards suite, then determine what types of spatial representations work well as user-interfaces.

[Michael Chui]

24.

Once upon a time, I helped a with a Java program. We were both at home. How?

Pretty simple. He set up a VNC server and requested access from my client, which I did. Then, we communicated primarily over AIM, and I watched him work. Because it was VNC, I could occasionally add in code when my words were insufficient. On many instances, I would literally type in a comment in his code to explain what was going on. (VNC permits you to use the computer's inputs without denying the primary user.)

Really, we were both tolerant of the lag that occurred due to a less-than-OC line through the internet. If we had a faster speed, that would have been nice. That would have been all we needed.

In graphics, while that's certainly not my background, it's certainly possible to do anything on a pair of desktop using the same combination of technologies. You'd need better exactitude, and better speed and graphic quality... but those are merely enhancements, not new technologies.

[AJ]

25.

Michael's comment makes me think I should clarify that when I said technology I meant stuff like networking/compression tech that would allow realtime desktop sharing for stuff that needs high refresh rates (and it needs to be an integral part of the environment, obviously) - totally agree about the VNC working well, used it to help a friend configure some stuff once.

[Bill Gardner]

26.

I just came from a meeting about designing our new hospital. This is a space where NAO or VO might be particularly helpful.

Hospitals are special workspaces. They are occuppied by patients, families, health care providers, non-medical staff, and medical trainees. They run 24 hours a day. The space has to support patient care, employee supervision, administration, education, family events, etc., all happening in more or less the same space at the same time. There is a constant demand for private space to meet and interact, and there is never enough of it. An immersive technology that would allow one new places interact 'off-stage' from the main show would be very useful.

[Dee Lacey]

27.

I can see this being extremely useful. Basically you'd need two applications, Virtual Team Meeting and My Virtual Office. (VTM and MVO for short)

Each person would need a sort of business-avatar. I would like to see either a standard choice of a few hundred avatars customizable with hairstyles and glasses, or if you pay a bit more there's a digitization process where you can have it create a "you" based avatar (use those light dots maybe?)

VTM would be like this: In a very much like a virtual world now, you walk your avatar into the meeting and sit down at a table. You should have some control over camera angle. Also there'd be various presentation tools in the room and you could zoom in on the whiteboard/slide presentation at will or draw back to see the people in the room. It would have a marker for who's speaking (spotlight on person perhaps) and a way to pass on the currently-speaking (double click on someone to pass it on). The lit up person could talk into a microphone and everyone would hear it. Everyone else could type comments in a text chat area (probably you can make it transparent and change the font etc to suit you). Everyone could also write on the "whiteboard" or maybe only the speaker could. Also the avatars would be programmed to all be looking at the speaker!

MVO would be like this: If someone needs to help you in your office, or you need to demonstrate a problem, collaborate, you would get the other person's office on your screen. It would show their avatar sitting at a computer and you could scroll in to see just their screen, or scroll out so you could see it in context with keyboard/mouse/chair/user. As they moved the mouse, the computer would animate the avatar to show mouse usage; it would show typing as well (have to make its best guess as to what finger was hitting what keys, or be upgraded to know somehow, maybe could easily be done with a pair of very lightweight gloves). Then you'd be able to watch them work and see what they were doing and where your UI could use improvement, or what their mistake was, or anything like that. And show them the actual steps to do what you're trying to teach them. MVO would probably also be very helpful to have as a two way thing for customer support and help lines. The tech could see what the customer was doing, and the tech could demonstrate what she wanted the customer to do, and both would more readily understand the other.

[Ken Fox]

28.

By the way, Sun Microsystems produced a neat video imagining the office of the future called "Starfire". Bruce Tognazzini wrote a lot about it in his book. You can check out the video on-line now I guess (I only have a VHS copy) at [http://www.asktog.com/starfire/starfireHome.html].

No virtual office here, but the video desk could easily function as one.

[Eric Random]

29.

On the topic of security, I should elaborate that desktop virtualization has been a solution specifically for remote security. That is, when one connects to the office, one uses a virtual desktop. This way, regardless of location or computer one is connecting from, one can use the same desktop. All work is maintained on a secure server managed by the company rather than the client, or employee's computer. Further administrators can maintain all applications from a single source, which cuts down on IT administration. For example, the line of remote access products provided by Citrix. This solution works well for highly mobile employees, and also in environments like hospitals, where secure information may need to be retrieved from multiple locations by highly mobile employees. Citrix, though, is more along the NAO model, with VOIP and IM capabilities.

Such virtualization is completely applicable to virtual worlds, though, as virtual worlds are absolute virtualization. Therefore, one could count this as an advantage for VO. The security concerns I mentioned previously concern more the peer-to-peer nature of ad-hoc telecommuting tools rather than client/server products like those offered by, for example, Citrix. A client/server model of VO which controls which information is stored locally and centrally can manage information more effectively and securely than those systems in place in physical offices. As technology improves, desktop virtualization will probably become more commonplace in physical officespace, but some other aspects must change first. I remember in 1996, it was just around the corner, and was used extensively in 1998, but too sensitive to latency, packet loss, and server util issues. It is used more and more, but moreso specifically for high mobility needs. Unfortunately, though, a VO client with an encrypted connection can still be vulnerable to keyloggers, screencaptures, and SecureID thefts, but slightly moreso than corporate computers on premises as many employees treat their work computers like home computers.

But, as I said earlier, a pseudo-VW (ie. more virtual than world) interface may be more applicable to these types of products, but more as a means of borrowing from common-sense representations to make complex virtualization of tools easier to manage. For example, clicking on a phone brings up a standard, but virtual, model of a physical phone, rather than some brand new interface one has to be trained on to simply dial a co-worker.

[Ken Fox]

30.

That would totally miss the point to have a virtual phone in a virtual office. I want a teleport pad!

[Brask Mumei]

31.

"For example, clicking on a phone brings up a standard, but virtual, model of a physical phone, rather than some brand new interface one has to be trained on to simply dial a co-worker."

Shoot me now! This sort of logic would have us still using rotary dials that are just programmed to send tones!

I mention again Google Talk. The goal of a phone interface is to ask me who I want to call. Physical phones do this through requiring me to type in a bunch of numbers which I have memorized. More modern cell phones have begun to abandon this by allowing me to scroll through a list and select my target. However, in the virtual office, I already must have some way to select my targets for email and IM. The exact same method should be used to select them for a phone conversation.

What stops people from using their computer as a phone isn't the lack of an upside down number pad that they have to click on to dial. It is that physical phones are still superior interfaces than mice. You think we'd have learned with the widespread adoption of the mousewheel that physical interfaces cannot be virtualized.

[Andrew Donoho]

32.

First of all, I want to thank all of the participants so far in this discussion. Ren and I thought VOs would be of interest to this community but we were not sure. I think the evidence is clear that there is interest in discussing the NAO v VO v VW choices facing us as we move forward.

Second because the comment window in the browser is so small, I was intending to comment on each poster's comments in a separate message. Please forgive this increase in posts but it helps me stay focussed upon each individual poster's issues..

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

33.

With respect to Brask Mumei's comments:

Personally, as an energy activist myself, I understand your concerns about encourging sprawl. If an energy crisis is the preciptating event for a VO transition, then sprawl will take care of itself.

Yes, I agree that a VO will have to be a convergence of NAO tools into a more concrete interface. Will this make a difference? I do not know. But with the tools starting to become available, I think we should look at the first steps towards this integration.

I, too, am optimistic about human adaptability. Yet, humans evolved in a three dimensional space. In a previous life, I wrote a statistical visualizaation tool called MacSpin. It basically was about 3 dimensional 'story-telling' about data. The exploratory/interactive nature of the display was extremely useful to understanding trends and relationships. Could a more concrete 3 dimensional representation of the office be the tool to enable innate human adaptability? Or are we stuck in a Kuhnian paradigm shift via employee retirement?

As to the utility of a tool being the key driver to low training acceptance, I must beg to differ. There appears to be, in my experience, a real social lag to tool proclivity. Economists call this the learning curve. Perhaps the lag in economically seeing the results of our productivity investments from the '80s until the late '90s is a demonstration of this social lag? I will agree with you that most tools are way over engineered for the economic benefit they offer.

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

34.

With respect to posts by AJ:

Being able to "look over someone's shoulder" would be a major advantage to a VO. Yet, as some later posters commented, tools like VNC are attempting to get there. It sounds as if I need to add screen collaboration to video as a major enabler of a VO.

As a traditional lazy programmer, I would, of course, try to make the VO easily integrate with the standard desktop and its tools.

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

35.

With respect to posts by Gerret Peters:

Yes, I agree that a VO would not be apppropriate for all industries. There are still some physical goods being produced in the western world.

Having had some discussions with the folks at iRobot, I also think that a robot proxy can be a very useful addition to the VO. Also making a construction process visible to an entire team, including the owner, would be nice. Though, the 'big brother' aspect of this kind of workplace surveillance does bother me.

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

36.

With respect to posts by Ken Fox:

Re: Serendipity... As a home worker, I find I miss these kinds of serendipitous connections too. In many ways to compensate, I have found this great seminar at Stanford, CS 380. It brings me back out of my office.

The home office worker can also suffer "advancement retardation". Out of sight is frequently out of mind to busy management types.

I, too, do not want to experience the trigger to a VO. Yet, to ignore that such things happen is to be unprepared. I would like to have a technology answer to an energy or terrorism crisis, if possible.

I also have to agree that outsourcing is not all it is cracked up to be. Many of the productivity gains are erased due to time zone differences. Outsourcing aside, I used to work closely with IBM's Hursley lab on Java. (Yes, IBM's main support and development center for Java was 8 timezones away from Sun.) These timezone differences are difficult to manage. At least with England, there was a modest overlap of the workday. When I've worked with my Japanese colleagues, 9pm meetings really crimp your family life. The timezone difference with India is worse.

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

37.

With respect to Michael Chui's comments:

You make a good case for the potential superiority of the NAO to the VO. Yet, becuase the things that you mention as being expensive, "the cameras, the massive usage of bandwidth, the construction of a virtual space, etc.", are not, in fact terribly expensive, I am encouraged to try the experiment. Of the items you mention as being expensive, the construction of the virtual space is the most costly. Currently though, I have support from my employer to examine this issue. Corporations do have to make some speculative investments to pave the way for innovative growth. (While lots of folks like to sneer how Xerox missed out on the growth of PCs from their PARC investments, the company actually did pretty well. Yes, they did not build an Apple or a Microsoft but they did build their business.) IBM is making a modest investment, for them, in letting me examine this issue.

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

38.

With respect to AJ's second post:

One of the issues with interface design, as with all design, is that it is an imperfect art. Yet, I doubt that the VO will be a replacement for a real office. It reduces the need for a real office but does not elimnate it. For example, much of IBM's workforce are consultants and sales people. They do not have offices. They can drop into mobile/transient worker spaces in key regions such as Silicon Valley. This example of NAO reality leads me to believe that this will continue in a VO world.

Yes, the Messenger contact list is a very basic, abstract form of your office organization chart. Would I expect to leverage the Messeneger list in any VO design? Yes, in fact, I would probably go farther. With the advent of web services in the client on Windows Vista, I expect to have some very interesting algorithmic ways to invoke application services from a VO shell than currently available from the desktop. As a Mac man myself, I also expect that Apple will have similarly interesting application service exporting functionality.

As to the transition being forced, I hope I didn't imply that folks would be required to use a VO against their will. I tried to provide a scenario that I felt would encourage folks, who may be already out of their comfort zone, to consider VOs as a way to continue to grow their business.

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

39.

With respect to Giff Constable's comments:

I want to amplify Giff's comment that,

" Business is fundamentally about human relationships, so the kind of technology we need is one that can help people form better relationships even if physically distant".

I think it is deeper than this. Business is about using teamwork to overcome common obstacles. If a VO can help people do this, to expand their human relationship to a trust bond forged through common success, then I am going to be one very happy technologist/'wanna be' sociology researcher.

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

40.

With respect to Eric Random's comments and answers to my questions:

"Is spatial representation the only difference between the VO and the NAO? If so, what advantage does spatial representation provide?"

In my view, spatial representation is just part of a VO. The real interesting part is the easy integration of 'always on' collaboration spaces in a visually understandable way. In my ad hoc experience, most of these fancy collaboration tools remain unused not because they are hard, even though some of them are quite difficult to use, but because they are abstract and, hence, invisible to the majority of employees. I still haven't really thought very hard about the place of the avatar in the VO when I have high bandwidth, high def quality video available.

Your comments about a VO as a shell around NAO objects is probably the only way this humble programmer can proceed. Yet, the modern desktop is woefully underutilized (I am writing this on 1680hX1050v screen). It hasn't substantially changed since the 1984 Mac or Windows 95.

"Does my communication centric view really trump the technology driven approach?
Our current ad-hoc manner of meeting our tele-commuting needs with easily-accessible technology is probably the biggest obstacle. There seems to be real confusion on standards of social engagement and professional virtual etiquette that has held strong for almost 10 years. Business standards, that are functional. technological and social, must be well understood prior to wide-spread use of virtual office space."

I understand your concerns. Yet, how else are we to understand these 'business standards' unless we build prototypes and present them to real users? The design of these spaces and how they couple with the social and business etiquette is a very hard problem. In fact, it may be a wicked problem. (In my world there is a hierarchy to problems: difficult problems can be overcome by hard work. Hard problems require inspiration to conquer. And wicked problems transcend hard problems because you cannot even define the problem, much less solve it.)

I also understand and appreciate some, though certainly not all of the security issues a telecommuting VO could raise. All architectures that I have seen lead me to believe that a substantial part of the infrastructure will be in the network and not on the client. This may mitigate some of the security issues.

"What suggestions do Terra Novans have for me as I navigate this application area?
What functional advantages does spatial representation provide for the application? This seems more like a solution looking for a problem, rather than a problem looking for a solution. One cannot look at just the social limitations of the NAO and prescribe the VO. There are limitations and advantages to NAO, limitations and advantages to VO, and limitations and advantages to physical office space. Further, such implementation is highly case specific. Personally, I would continue along a path of general NAO business standards suite, then determine what types of spatial representations work well as user-interfaces."

The spatial representation is an attempt to make the abstract concrete. Like all metaphorical constructs, it will have significant differences from the items it is representing. Will this have any value for real users? I don't know.

Sometimes it is OK to play around with a solution looking for a problem. You just need to remember that that is actually what you are doing. In my case, I am recognizing that most of the tools have emerged in a commodity form that allows this kind of 'play', if you will, to be quite inexpensive.

I do plan to follow your advice and plan to build upon existing business suites rather than rebuild this technology.

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

41.

With respect to Michael Chui's second post (actually third but second in this comment stream):

"In graphics, while that's certainly not my background, it's certainly possible to do anything on a pair of desktop using the same combination of technologies. You'd need better exactitude, and better speed and graphic quality... but those are merely enhancements, not new technologies."

I think we can rest assured that folks will be improving these tools with respect to fluid motion and precision. Some of the commercial screen sharing apps can be quite good.

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

42.

With respect to Bill Gardner's comments:

"Hospitals are special workspaces. They are occuppied by patients, families, health care providers, non-medical staff, and medical trainees. They run 24 hours a day. The space has to support patient care, employee supervision, administration, education, family events, etc., all happening in more or less the same space at the same time. There is a constant demand for private space to meet and interact, and there is never enough of it. An immersive technology that would allow one new places interact 'off-stage' from the main show would be very useful."

Please help me understand this a little bit better. I would think that a hospital that was short on private space would still be short with a VO. You still need privacy on each end of a VO conversation. Since a hospital is the ultimate in 'hands on care', I am confused.

Now there is a scenario that I am working on for hospitals - the remote trauma center. There is an area of Interstate-10 outside of San Antonio that has an inordinate number of tractor trailer rig accidents. The trauma center in this bedroom community has the first responders but does not have enough need for a trauma expert. I am exploring how we could use high definition video and a network to let the physicians at the level one trauma center in San Antonio view critical patients in the bedroom community and then advise local doctors on transfer options/triage. An easy to use 3D interface may be what we need to make this system usable by the harried San Antonio physician (remember s/he is in an overburdened level one trauma center him/herself).

Andrew

[Andrew Donoho]

43.

With respect to comments made by Dee Lacey:

"VTM would be like this: In a very much like a virtual world now, you walk your avatar into the meeting and sit down at a table. You should have some control over camera angle. Also there'd be various presentation tools in the room and you could zoom in on the whiteboard/slide presentation at will or draw back to see the people in the room. It would have a marker for who's speaking (spotlight on person perhaps) and a way to pass on the currently-speaking (double click on someone to pass it on). The lit up person could talk into a microphone and everyone would hear it. Everyone else could type comments in a text chat area (probably you can make it transparent and change the font etc to suit you). Everyone could also write on the "whiteboard" or maybe only the speaker could. Also the avatars would be programmed to all be looking at the speaker!"

While you mention both a Virtual Team Meetingroom (VTM) and a My VIrtual Office (MVO), I think they can be collapsed into one view. Your office is always a VTM. I think the goal is to make a shell that radically enables collaboration in a visually concrete fashion. Yes, the space would be more complex than a real meeting room but there is no real need for two separate spaces. Your space would presented in a clean, uncluttered view to your collaborators.

This, in general, brings up the issue of how close should we actually model physical reality? My view is, much as we do with the PC/Mac desktop, that the representation is not even close to exact. It is really only something that could exist on a computer screen. It is intended to be something that exploits and amplifies our 3 dimensional perceptive system for enhanced productivity and remote telepresencing. When we are done with a good VO, like a good computer desktop, they will only have a faint resemblance to the real thing.

Andrew

[Franek]

44.

I hesitate to comment in this thread because I believe that a prerequisite to a virtual office is a consolidated virtual surrogate for a person in the electronic environment. That surrogate has to be in place or there is nothing to inhabit the virtual office.

That being said, I’d like to suggest that rendezvous is a gating capability of a virtual office. Indeed, arranging, limiting and facilitating connections between people are pivotal human activities. And for electronically mediated communication it is exactly these activities that can be most effectively enhanced. The caveat, of course, being that the quality of the mediated communication must rival physical collocation for the class of communication being considered.

The first question then, is to what extent the ease of hooking up can offset the lowered quality of communication that the mediated link offers. Using mobile phones as an example, the ease of adding numbers to the phones directory, possibly annotating them with images, initiating the connection with a small number of keystrokes, calling on a whim from almost any location, and filtering incoming calls far offset the problems of poor connections and not being there in person. What’s more, social connections are facilitated because of the event-driven nature of communication initiation. “I was thinking about you so I thought I’d call” (and I could).

It’s important to separate the communication medium (in our example digital telephony) from its content. Sound, images and video are modalities carried on the medium and they can have any content. Ultimately, the success of communicating the content is the measure of the quality of the communication. On the mobile phone picking out the two words “… baby … delivered …” may be enough to meet a new father’s quality requirements. But the blurry, low-res image of the new arrival sent to grandma’s mobile phone a week later may not pass the test.

Moving to the next step in virtual spaces for various “work related” activities, then, could mean identifying those aspects of people’s activities which would profit most from better rendezvous and depend least on degraded quality of content communication. In doing that we can see that the niches are already filled with things like email, mobile phones, IM and desktop-collaboration tools. Since these are proven to meet the test of ease-of-establishing-the-connection vs. connection quality, can a virtual office provide anything that would enhance their abilities?

An earlier poster pointed out that dialing a virtual phone with mouse clicks was taking real-world metaphors too far. But underlying the comment was that the virtual world had control over all the communication media to which the individual had access. And that may be a path to the virtual office. In one sense the office is the place where all work-related communications come together. So an organizing principle of the virtual office could be facilitating making connections and categorizing the resulting communication content across all the available media. The “3D world” component might best be guided by the predispositions of the various users for a particular kind of interface.

If we go that route, though, we have to be sensitive to previous failed attempts to consolidate communication in single products. The desktops with phone, fax and video all integrated into a single box never caught on. In an earlier life I suggested that this may be because there was no virtual “office” that actively extended itself to the communications capabilities that the user had available at any given time. In that interpretation, the corporate virtual office is the place where the personal surrogates of each employee communicate. And the employee is connected to his or her personal surrogate through whatever media are available to them at any given time – be that a mobile phone at the end of a thin-bandwidth link or a full-on VR setup in their home.

[Prokofy Neva]

45.

Hi Andrew, I remember I met you at SOP III and got your avatar name but now I've misplaced it, I know you may not come to SL much but if you're on give me a call sometime if you'd like a tour.

Aside from the obvious problems in SL like lag or crashing of servers or griefers doing fire-prim bombing, etc., all problems you can manage, here's how I see the virtual office capacity of SL:

Advantages:

o save cost on domestic and international travel
o remove some social barriers like race/class/nationality
o interact in real time or with stored objects/data
o video and audio features
o prototyping by building with prims
o greater expression of emotionality
o greater amplitude for right-brain thinking
o immersiveness -- whole-body/whole-mind experience
o acceleration of models -- instantly see if it works or bites
o instant feedback
o quick creation of task-focused or themed groups
o visual representation of data
o training and testing

Disadvantages

o increase cost of hardware, software, graphics cards, DSL, etc.
o introduce social barriers like "private island vs. mainland" or "feted project v. non-feted" or "faster connection v. non-faster connection"
o only room for half-sentences in IMs in typed chat
o sporadic performance on voice/audio like Skype
o wonky build tools with steep learning curve
o greater expression of emotionality--misunderstandings
o insidious IMs -- undermine group dialogue
o greater capacity for right-brain thinking (left brain suppressed and not balancing out)
o immersiveness=time suck by contrast to RL
o obstructivitis (what I call one person's lag in the group on technical/social/spiritual issues and their inability to perceive the needs of others in a group or the group's shared purpose in a virtual environment
o hippie dope-smoking group tools (circulates all cash equally to all individuals, enables any officer to steal land from any other officer, etc. -- these are being revised in the Bright Future).

You'll note that the same things that are a disadvantage, like enhanced emotionality and spiritual communion with other beings, is also a disadvantage, when these kinds of experiences prove either time sucks or get in the way of linear, left-brain work.

Still, your company has offices in Russia, right? So it would make sense to have them in SL, too, it's an emerging nation, in transition to democracy, too.

Prokofy Neva

[hikaru]

46.

I think one of the critical assumptions being made here is that a virtual office must in some way physically emulate a flesh world office.

The modes of communication in an online enviroment differ from the flesh world. It would not make sense in an optimal work environment to replicate flesh world UI, ergonomics, etc.

Queuing is different. Acoustics is different. Field of vision is different. Etc.

The medium and the message are intertwined. I would say re-evaluate the goals, and work from there, as opposed to starting with tools, and figuring what they might be used for.

It is already possible to run virtual -- non-physical -- offices today. High-end gaming rigs can render one that looks like a flesh world office. However, the advantage gained would only be virtual skin deep.

[Paul Moody]

47.

So I've waited a while before commenting to see where this is going. Like Andrew, I work at IBM and have recently been involved in a number of business oriented VO VW VR brainstormings, including one last month I organized with MIT's Media Lab. I also did the homework of reading the research papers from recents game developer conferences (I'm in research and its my job to leverage what others have learned). What the studies and papers suggest is that one of the most important appeals of VWs is that "they are not real" and there is a chance for playing around with identity and social conventions (hence the name "second life"). In business, mis-representation of yourself is a no-no. Prokofy suggests that avatars will erase social barriers of race/class/nationality, etc. Having worked with teams in the UK, China, and India as well as all over the US, I find that the biggest challenge in communicating around the globe is not the pronounciation of the english words or the way people look but instead a lack of common understanding of the metaphors the words construct to make their point. Not knowing anything about who I'm working with would make it painful to express things since metaphors are shortcuts to shared concepts. So I posit that in a VO your avatar should be as close a representation to your RL body as possible - possibly revealing even more than your RL body can in f2f (such as personal interests, etc.). Otherwise, we all must work in a super politically correct manner because you never really know who you are working with.

On the VO - I worked in early video games (including networked VR games), then office suites, then collaboration tools (my current research area). The only advanatge of VO would be is that I can see gestures and expressions of others (which by the way are always false in VW's as they are an explicit act of the operator vs. a natural un-thinking act in RL). From many years of experience, video conferencing and shared application use (either shared app or shared screen)solve many of the problems of collaborating with others at a distance. If those technologies were available to all whenever they were needed, a VW imersive qualities would be seen as distractions.

All of this makes me feel that the current interest in bringing VR to the office is a "forced fit" (similar attempts were used to bring VR to on-line shopping with failure after failure - no real advantage, and lots of extra effort bandwidth and costs). The fact that VWs are becoming popular as a place to play is being mistaken for they are becoming a place to do work. The same logic would suggest that we all hold business meetings in Disney World's park since they are popular - but clearly it is silly to consider that suggestion. IMHO the only place for VWs in business is to sell services 'in game'. They are becoming real markets of substantial size. So the question is not how to move our offices into VWs, but instead, what are the services of value that businesses could offer in VWs that 'players' in VW would pay for (and in SL we see this evolving). Then the business use of VWs would be more like a retail store for a company - some people work there to service the needs of those customers that buy services through that channel. But not everyone in Apple works in the store in the mall - so not everyone in a business should work in VWs.

48.

Turn your postal mail into email -- manage your snail mail online and be more productive.

[Aaron]

49.

Global Virtual Office offer mailing addresses, phone and fax services in over 70 cities worldwide.
www.global-virtualoffice.com