About the Meeting

• Many of the Virtual Worlds @ Work workshops have focused on the use of virtual worlds for learning and training (L&T) applications, because most surveys of users have shown L&T to be one of the most popular uses of virtual worlds. But another popular application among users of virtual worlds is for meetings and events, because immersive environments offer a unique set of affordances that result in participants' higher level of engagement, especially in comparison with the use of conference calls or use of Web-conferencing meetings.
• Virtual meetings is one of the use cases of strong interest to the team at Stanford University that is developing the Sirikata open-source virtual-worlds platform. We therefore thought that a jointly sponsored workshop between Stanford's Humanities Laboratory and Strategic Business Insights' Virtual Worlds @ Work to explore issues around virtual meetings and events made good sense.
• Virtual meetings have become very popular in the past year or two, and a strategic partner of Virtual Worlds @ Work, George P. Johnson (GPJ)—one of the foremost experience-marketing agencies in the world—has seen growing interest among its clients in virtual meetings. This workshop was therefore an opportunity also to hear some perspectives on virtual meetings from GPJ.