Thursday, April 26, 2012

Week 12 - Working in Virtual Worlds

Dear Linden Labs,

Working in virtual worlds is an interesting topic. IBM has taken it to the next level by having virtual work done in second life. There are a lot of benefits of working in a virtual world, as your article explained. There's the fact that you can overcome virtual distance, temporal distance, and physical distance all at once by having meetings in a virtual world. It's also a great way for employees to get to know each other in a virtual setting, especially if they cannot physically meet in the same place. It creates a space that people can meet which alleviates the problems of trying to acquire real life space, which can sometimes be a problem.

However, your article fails to mention any of the drawbacks of using second life as a virtual meeting place. One of the biggest drawbacks is the fact that not everyone is as techno savvy as others, and sometimes the virtual gap between two people can be so great that technologies such as second life aren't something that can realistically be bridged. Aside from this, over reliance on technologies brings problems of its own. What happens when the virtual meeting space is no longer available? I feel like this article should have included some of these drawbacks and explained maybe how second life could have overcome them.


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