Restoring the Meaning of Virtual Collaboration

by Patti Anklam

Bill Ives posted about Virtual Environments for Business: Unisfair a few days ago, commenting on the emergence of a new style of trade show. I have myself recently been delighted about MPK20, Sun’s Virtual Workspace, which I read about first in a CIO.COM article.

“MPK” is Sun Microsystems designation for the buildings on its Menlo Park campus. There are 19 buildings of brick and mortar. MPK20 is the building where the virtual teams meet to collaborate, to bump into colleagues serendipitously, and to have meetings. Project Wonderland, as it is called, offers a really special glimpse into what is possible in the development of applications that support human interaction in a virtual space.

Demos guided by Nicole Yankelovich include a walkthrough of the the “Virtual Workspace” that illustrates a virtual team room, offices, a meeting room, and a relaxation space. What impressed me the most was the way in which the workspace is designed to enable people to collaborate on content. I captured a screen from the video file that shows Nicole and a colleague editing a Powerpoint presentation in virtual space.

MPK20 Collaboration

We have long been used to the terms “virtual team” and “virtual collaboration” to mean the work of people who do not happen to be sitting together even though (to my mind) they are really collaborating. Seeing Nicole and Joe collaborate in a truly virtual environment indicates that perhaps the term virtual, as we have been using it, was merely an intimation of the office of the future.

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2 Comments »

  The Rootpad » Blog Archive » Linky goodness for 30-01-2008 wrote @ January 30th, 2008 at 6:26 am

[…] Restoring the Meaning of Virtual Collaboration More useful than second life (tags: virtual collaboration @work second_life secondlife) […]

  jessica lipnack wrote @ January 31st, 2008 at 5:03 pm

Patti, I agree about Sun’s virtual efforts. What they’re doing strikes me as quite different and somewhat ahead of what others are up to. That said, how would I really know? :) The one issue that comes up for me is around the asynch part of collaboration, which doesn’t appear to be as well integrated. But easy to sit on the sidelines and critique. I blogged it in December and Nicole Yankelovich, the project manager, commented, saying that they’re trying to drop the MPK name as it sounds so techie and refer to it as Project Wonderland. FYI, Aerospace Corporation, possibly the first enterprise to use Second Life, is doing some fascinating stuff in this arena, finding that they can do rocket simulations that simply can’t be done any other way.

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