Virtual Worlds @ Work Meetings

VWW includes access to a variety of meetings for presentations and discussions about key virtual-worlds issues and trends as well as for networking and dialogue with representatives of other sponsor organizations.

Meetings can take the form of workshops (face-to-face meetings at SBI's headquarters in Silicon Valley, as well as in Tokyo, Japan, and London, England), virtual meetings (sessions in Second Life or another virtual space), or webinars (Web-based presentation sessions).

Future Workshops, Webinars, and Virtual Meetings

2010

  • We are currently working on the schedule for our virtual and face-to-face events and will post the dates as soon as possible. Below are the topics that we are currently planning to address at our events:

  • VW-Deployment Case Studies

    • Benefits and challenges facing adopters of VWs
    • Details of several case studies—including a high-tech company in Silicon Valley , a global pharmaceuticals company, and a global energy company
    • Lessons learned so far by early adopters

  • Virtual Worlds and Government

    • Discussion of what government agencies, including the U.S. armed services, have done with exploratory or pilot projects
    • Identification of projects under way or in plans in other countries
    • The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative's immersive-learning activities

  • VW Tech Roadmap

    • Review of a variety of emerging tools and technologies, from platforms to authoring tools and so on
    • Discussion of which technologies may find the greatest use and have the greatest impact
    • Review of user-adoption strategies around emerging tools and technologies

  • Open-Source Platforms: What Role and Impact?

    • Sirikata/Stanford: Current status and future plans
    • Open Croquet/Cobolt: How does it compare and where does it stand vis-à-vis other platforms?
    • Wonderland: What is its future with or without Oracle?

  • The Oil Industry as an Early Adopter of VWs: Industry Case Study

    • Key applications for VWs in oil industry
    • Description and discussion of a European initiative to build a global infrastructure for 3-D models and objects in oil-and-gas industry
    • Expectations for what we may see in next two to three years on this front

Past Meetings

2010

  • 18 January 2010 Webinar

    This webinar addressed virtual-worlds technologies in a broader context of enterprise collaboration, to gain a better understanding of what role VWs can play.

2009

  • 30 October 2009 Workshop

    This was a joint workshop with the Humanities Lab at Stanford University. The session explored various issues around the topic of "virtual meetings," in which enterprises and virtual-worlds developers have shown increasing interest.

  • 9 October 2009 Workshop

    This workshop was a session for sharing knowledge and ideas about past, current, and future projects focused on designing virtual experiences in museums as well as for other exhibits and events.

  • 25 June 2009 Workshop

    This workshop focused on design of effective learning and collaboration in virtual worlds. Based on our experience in earlier workshops and meetings, this topic emerged as an important one that we felt we needed to address—and one that we have not previously focused on directly.

  • 29 April 2009 Virtual Meeting

    This virtual meeting gave us a chance to experience—because the meeting took place in Qwaq Forums—and hear about the latest update to the Qwaq Forums platform. We also heard a case study from Chevron about what it is doing with this platform.

  • 18 March 2009 Webinar

    This webinar examined open-source virtual-worlds developments and their implications for enterprise adopters.

  • 11 February 2009 Virtual Meeting

    This virtual meeting explored enterprise applications of virtual worlds—and in this case, specifically OpenSim-based VWs—and participants had a tour of the innovative Shaspa initiative of Oliver Goh and his collaborators (including the Serious Game Institute at Coventry University).

2008

  • 3 December 2008 Virtual Meeting

    This virtual-worlds meeting covered lessons learned by early adopters of virtual-worlds platforms and explored adoption experiences in various industries in North America and Europe.

  • 30 October 2008 Workshop

    This Menlo Park, California workshop focused on Virtual Worlds Platforms for Learning and Collaborative Work. It featured a mix of presentations and discussions among the attendees in Menlo Park, as well as a number of sessions in Second Life.

  • 18 September 2008 Webinar

    This webinar—Toward Browser-Based Virtual Worlds—featured two presentations. One examined current and planned browser-based virtual worlds. The second explored the implications of trends and developments for enterprise users.

  • 27 June 2008 Workshop

    This workshop was the final meeting of the first year of VWW, and one of the topics was to review trends and developments from the past year and to look ahead to what we expect to see in the next 12 months.

  • 27 May 2008 Webinar

    This webinar addressed two topics: How to plan and implement virtual-worlds projects and how to select a virtual-worlds platform.

  • 28 April 2008 Workshop

    This special workshop, in collaboration with two other organizations, focused on the use of virtual worlds for new employee training (that is, onboarding) and sales training. We heard from a leading IBM practitioner as well as from a number of organizations that are planning or implementing virtual worlds for these kinds of learning and training applications.

  • Before May 2008, Virtual Worlds @ Work was the Virtual-Worlds Consortium.

    We rebranded our consortium "Virtual Worlds @ Work" because of the growing importance of the use of virtual worlds in business applications.

  • 27 March 2008 Virtual Meeting

    At this virtual meeting we focused on the use of virtual worlds to create virtual work spaces. We heard the CEO of Rivers Run Red—one of the leading virtual-worlds services companies—describe the company's work on this front, and we also heard a case study of Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer-products companies.

  • 25 February 2008 Workshop

    This second face-to-face workshop focused on one of the application areas that have generated considerable interest in the virtual-worlds industry and especially among enterprise users: collaborative work.

2007

  • 12 December 2007 Virtual Meeting

    Our first virtual meeting in Second Life examined how organizations can use Second Life and other virtual worlds to expand and accelerate their innovation processes and activities.

  • 9 October 2007 Workshop

    Kickoff workshop at SRI International's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, with presentations, interactive discussions, and networking covering a range of virtual-worlds issues and developments.