Letter to Your Boss About Virtual Immersive Environments

So, you want to create a virtual immersive learning environment and you want to start with a well known product before thinking about paying some money for a behind-the-firewall solution. You've tentatively brought up the concept of using the virtual world of Second Life but have been shot down by the IT folks and your boss who want to know why Second Life should be considered as a viable solution.

Well, Second Life to the rescue.  Over at the Second Life blog, they have posted an open letter providing some pretty good reasons why it should be considered, at least for your initial pilot project into a Virtual Immersive Environment (I think other products are more appropriate for a larger roll-out but let's stick with a small pilot for now.)

Here are a couple of the reasons:

• Second Life can solve real-life business problems. This is especially true for providing realistic 3D environments such as border crossings or retail environments.
  
• Organizations can purchase private regions and have complete control over who enters the area.  
•  Almost 20% of Fortune 1000 companies are doing something in virtual worlds. 

Check out the letter, it could prove very useful as you build your case for virtual immersive environments.

Also check out this report by ThinkBalm on virtual worlds which describe some very interesting results from a study they conducted. 

• More than 40% of those surveyed (26 of 66) saw a positive total economic benefit from investments in immersive technologies in 2008 and 1Q 2009. More than 50% of respondents (34 of 65) expect to obtain a positive total economic benefit in 2009. The number of respondents who expect to obtain economic benefit of $25,000 USD or more in 2009 is more than double the number who indicated they achieved this level for 2008 / 1Q 2009.

• Nearly 30% of survey respondents (19 of 66) said their organization recouped their investment in immersive technologies in less than nine months, once their project(s) launched. Almost 30% of respondents (19 of 66) said their organization did not recoup their investment.  Another 38% (25 of 66) said they didn’t know if their organizations had recouped their investment. This is not an unexpected finding because many Immersive Internet initiatives in 2008 and 1Q 2009 were experiments or pilots. 

So these little tidbits should help you to build your business cases for virtual worlds.

Karl Kapp is the Assistant Director of Bloomsburg University’s Institute for Interactive Technologies and a professor of instructional technology. See his own blog, Kapp Notes for information on the convergence of learning and technology. He is the author of the book Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning.   

Comments

[Jessica]

Many Thanks for this post. I just landed up on this post and I really appreciated reading it. It is full of resourceful information.
Thanks for your writer once again. Regular update on such posts shall make it more interesting to read.
Regards,
Katherine
http://www.forexsoftware-free.info

[Karl Kapp]

Thanks Katherine for the comment, I will be posting on a more regular basis from here forward.

[Belstaff Jackets]

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[Love Dolls]

hey inside the vocab. do we must do the academic vocab. and also do we must do region 1

[Canada Goose UK]

I think she just wants to be the Asian Ann Coulter.