Secondlife Weapons

A few years ago, we launched  the SecondLifeGrid.net, a website for Residents and organizations interested in working, learning, and developing in Second Life. Since that time, the enterprise/government, education, and developer communities have experienced strong growth. In order to better serve the unique needs of each community, we have developed three distinct microsites that will replace SecondLifeGrid.net.

• Second  Life Work: Second Life Work is focused on the business and government communities that use SL for virtual meetings, events, training, prototypes, and simulations to catalyze innovation while reducing the cost and environmental impact of travel.
• Second Life Education: Second Life Education is designed for educators who are interested in compelling, cost-effective virtual education solutions to amplify an existing curriculum or create new models for engaged, collaborative learning. There's also a very cool  Education Directory listing schools in Second Life today; we invite you to add your educational institution to the directory.
• Second Life Develop: Second Life Develop is the one-stop-shop for Residents interested in building in Second Life (using  LSL), building on the platform, and extending it using APIs. There are lots of great resources and tips for those just starting out and experts  alike.

Please note, we will continue offering the Second Life Grid Status.

Thanks and  let us know how we can continue to make the microsite experiences even  better! Send us your thoughts at slworkfeedback@lindenlab.com.

Cheers,  Amanda Linden

Today we'd like to introduce our first international case study featuring Germany's TUEV NORD Group a worldwide certification and testing company.  When M and I visited Munich earlier this year, we hosted a press roundtable with Frank Boerger of TUEV NORD and Solution Provider Hanno Tietgens of BÜRO X Media Lab.  Frank and Hanno talked about how TUEV NORD has used Second Life as a meeting venue, a training platform and even a recruiting tool.  To learn more, download the case study now in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French or view it online at Work.SecondLife.com

From the summary:

Since 1869, when the company was founded in Germany to inspect boilers, TUEV NORD Group's unwavering mission has been to "make the world safer."  Today, TUEV NORD Group has over 8,500 employees in more than 70 countries and a broad international client base for its unique consulting, service and inspection portfolio and management of complex safety solutions.  The company's 3D presence can be found in Second Life by the region name of "TUEV Nord".  Since 2007, the region has been used for recruiting, meetings, game based education and other new ways to share knowledge.  An ambitious long-distance training project produced a complete return on investment within a year.  Now the company is ready to share the benefits of its extensive virtual development with clients.

The TUEV NORD case study is not only a demonstration of the range of benefits that companies around the world are achieving today in Second Life, but also a great example of the incredible value that the global community of talented Solution Providers offer to organizations. Read the case study, and go check out TUEV NORD in Second Life here.

For those of you not familiar with Metanomics, it is one of the largest and most successful business communities in Second Life and they also have a weekly mixed-reality event—in SL and streamed on the web—that is one of the most well attended business gatherings in SL. Under the leadership of Doug Thompson (SL: Dusan Writer), CEO of Remedy Communications and Robert Bloomfield (SL: Beyers Sellers), Professor of Accounting at Cornell University, the Metanomics program has thrived and trail blazed several best practices around building community and producing large mixed-reality events in Second Life. So, we just had to do a case study exploring how they built the program and showcasing their accomplishments, entitled, “A Vibrant Community and Mixed-Reality Events for Virtual World Business and Policy, “ now available in English, German, French, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese on the SL Work website. The case study is also mentioned on the Metanomics blog.

Here’s the executive summary:

"Metanomics™ explores the serious uses of virtual worlds and, from its start, has built a global community as a weekly discussion of policy and research. Centered on a talk-show program that broadcasts live from Second Life, Metanomics is an example of how organizations are building engaged communities and cost-effectively developing content that can be widely distributed on the Web."

"Metanomics began in September 2007 as a visionary guest lecture series for business and law undergrads by Robert Bloomfield, a professor at Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, but it soon attracted business and thought leadership-minded professionals from the Second Life user community. The broad ranging audience participation won the attention of Remedy Communications, which bought Metanomics in December 2008. The weekly program, now in its third year, has since evolved into a successful and vibrant mixed-media communication network—using both inworld and Web-streaming technologies—consisting of over 3,000 content developers, businesses, educators, and thinkers."

So, I encourage you to check out the case, join the Metanomics community and participate in their weekly events—generally every Wednesday at 12pm PT—but check their events listing for specific dates/times. And, get involved in the Metanomics community on their Forum, Facebook group, and Twitter feed.

One other note. Esbee Linden and I were invited onto Metanomics yesterday to discuss Viewer 2 and Shared Media. Check out the replay.

Enjoy!

P.S. And, if you’re looking for other business-related communities and events, I’m also a big fan of Gronstedt Group’s “Train for Success,” events every Thursday at 9:00am PT.

People often ask the question, why should I use Second Life instead of web-based tools or real world events for training?

I spoke on a panel at the Virtual Edge conference this week that addressed that question.  I pulled together the following results that provide a variety of measures of efficacy for projects done in Second Life, and one anecdotal look at why virtual worlds may provide an effective platform.  There seem to be two components of this.  One is the impact of people's association with their avatar where they're engaged but also have some distance that seems to provide increased learning over other platforms (see my blog post "Engagement in Second Life".  The other is the ability to create an environment that enables you to "be there" - a key finding of the Border Guard project at Loyalist College.

In addition to these results, the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research  publishes a variety of research that includes studies of many kinds of use of virtual worlds.

1) Loyalist College Border Guard Training

The amazing results of the training and simulation program have led to significantly improved grades on students’ critical skills tests, taking scores from a 56% success in 2007, to 95% at the end of 2008 after the simulation was instituted.

2) Michelin - IT training

Outcomes included better visualization of complex concepts, and faster and better learning. Other training methods had failed completely and Second Life was effective at achieving their training goals. Forrester Research, Case Study: Michelin Uses Second Life For Enterprise Architecture Training by Erica Driver  (There is a fee for this Case Study)

3) Medical: RTI: Avatars could help fight obesity

The study found that that 80 percent of respondents who reported high levels of physical activity for their avatars also reported participating in high levels of physical activity in their real lives.  "Based on these preliminary results, it seems likely that virtual reality users may adjust their identity to be consistent with that of their avatars," said Elizabeth Dean, research survey methodologist at RTI and the study's lead author.

4) Philips Design: To Play or Not to Play by Slava Kozlov and Nicole Reinhold

They found the virtual world had the capability to get people out of a '4 grey walls' mentality and because of the surprising nature of the environment, encouraged a more creative and flexible approach that increased innovation and creativity compared to other meeting platforms.

5) Virtual Worlds vs. Video: "Why Webcams Fail" by Caleb Booker

And finally, there's this opinion piece that examines people's reaction to being on camera compared to using an avatar for meetings.  Virtual space experiences work better than a webcam experience for three reasons:

1. You can maintain some “personal space”.
2. Whatever learning mode you’re in, chances are you’ll do fine.
3. The experience fills your field of vision far more readily.

Other Resources

SL WIki: Other Second Life Studies

If you know of other studies that show quantifiable and direct benefits of using Second Life, please add them to this page.

SL Wiki: Business Articles about Second Life

Looking for a way to get your organization started quickly in Second Life? Linden Lab now offers four pre-built regions with landscaping, buildings and appropriate additional features for purchase by invoice.

Developed Region Styles

I recently got a request from a company that was looking for examples of interactive human body exhibits in Second Life - like a beating heart or interactive blood flow.

The closest I know about is a 50' high model of an interactive human larynx (SLURL) done by Don Bickley of NMU (see and read more about it on this blog post).  However, there are a number of resources for science and health-related projects in Second Life.

Start with the SL Wiki; you'll find sections on Science, Health, and Education that have links to various resources including places in Second Life.  There are a number of sites that have great lists of science and health related Places in SL: SL Science Center Group maintains a web site that includes a places list. There's a health site (SLHealthy) that maintains a health-related places list.

Finally, there's SciLands - the central hub for science-related programs in Second Life and one of the first archipelagos formed by bringing together projects with related interests.

A number of real-world corporate training companies have discovered Second Life as a platform for delivering their content to their corporate customers.  We'd like to share what they're doing as a great example of how Second Life can be used as a training solution.  And you may find their services useful - either in RL or SL.

Here are three I've come across. Please let me know if you know of others.

Virtual Training Partners was formed as a Division of Shapiro Negotiation Institute, which has been doing classroom style training for the past 16 years.  While clients asked for distance learning solutions such as webinars, SNI was never able to effectively translate its highly interactive content into this less interactive medium.  Mark Jankowski, President of SNI, discovered Second Life in In December of 2008, and created Virtual Training Partners to translate SNI's negotiation courses into SL's immersive environment.

Shapiro Negotiations has created scenarios and activities in Second Life that mirror their real-world training but create a more compelling experience.  In the real world, we can only show you a picture of a place related to a particular negotiation tactic - but it's just a picture.  In Second Life, we've built a series of environments so that you're immersed in the experience of the place, rather than just seeing it.  You learn the tactic, then face a forced-choice activity where you move to a particular answer location and discuss your choice.  The experience is vivid and memorable.  One of our clients noted, "Over a month later, I can still recall the 4 environments - and the associated tactic.  Could I do that if it had been just slides on a screen? I doubt it."

Mark notes his clients have benefitted from their SL training in 3 ways:

1. Being able to provide training that would otherwise have been cancelled due to travel restrictions
2. Eliminating travel costs. For instance, one program that was moved from a classroom format to Second Life, had participants from Australia, Tokyo, UK, NYC, LA, and South Africa.  Travel expenses alone would have been $20,000+.
3. Increased Productivity.  For the program described above, participants would have been out of the office for at least a week to attend the classroom training.
4. Increased retention of material.  Because we are able to present seminars in one hour segments inworld, as opposed to two-day classroom formats, participants have been able to learn and practice new skills, which naturally to higher retention when compared to having all of the information being absorbed over a 2-day classroom experience.

For more information, SL: Marc Wizenheim, Virtual Training Partners

nTeams partnered with ALCUS design team in 2009 to create in Second Life an engaging "off-site" for distributed teams to work together every day, any time to create innovative business solutions. "Gallup studies show that before teams can innovate, they must be engaged and inspired to work together. Only then does team creativity and collaboration occur," says Barbara Westmoreland, nTeams Founder who for 25 years has lead global teams for Procter & Gamble, IBM, Wachovia, and Xerox. "Yet with employees scattered across the globe, communicating through non-engaging web meetings, conference calls, and emails, with no travel budget to meet face-to-face, employee engagement has plummeted.... and it's costing U.S. corporations alone $325 billion dollars a year.

"I was looking for a platform to deliver nTeams distributed team training and tools to increase engagement when I discovered Second Life. Its immersive environment provides distributed teams with a virtual place to learn and work together 'face-to-face' without travel and meeting costs," says Westmoreland, who considered Web 2.0 and other virtual world platforms before choosing Second Life for its extensive virtual world building capabilities, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility. nTeams training includes 'life-like' team building experiences, such as an underwater adventure to minimize stress, a river ride to create a shared vision, and a survival hike to experience making value-based decisions. "How can distributed teams experience team building challenges using web meetings or video conferences?" asks Westmoreland. "Second Life is the only technology on the market where you can you cost-effectively create training scenarios that engage and inspire distributed teams to innovate. And with Second Life Enterprise, now corporations can have nTeams behind their firewall to ensure confidentiality of their distributed team's innovative business solutions."

For more information, SL: Lillian Brentley, nTeams

Human Mosaic Systems helps organizations see the gestalt or Big Picture of complexity and how it is impacting their own particular and unique organization through facilitating group processes, workshops, classes, non-scripted immersive learning environments (virtual reality), consulting, software programs, and coaching. We help leaders develop greater understanding and abilities to meet the new challenges facing organizations in today's fast paced complex world. We not only help individuals see more clearly what their organization is experiencing, we help organizations move through transformations, create paradigm shifts in understanding, and harness change through our certified self-organization process, dynamic interactive processes, and complex decision making skills. We help organizations meet the challenges of the future in an ever changing global environment.

HMS has been in Second Life for over a year now.  Beverly Gay McCarter, Principal of HMS, says: "In a dispersed global work environment, Second Life's virtual environment allows Human Mosaic Systems (HMS) to reach clients who might otherwise not be accessible, saving our clients time and money in travel costs and lost work time." It also allows us to hold consults, meetings, workshops and classes in a dynamic environment that facilitates trust and enhances communication through a sense of presence - the sharing of a space with others. Second Life's virtual environment allows HMS to conduct *non-scripted* immersive learning simulations to help clients practice and truly learn in a dynamic kinetic fashion skills we teach that help them to understand themselves and others, understand complexity and it's impact, to make decisions in complex environments, and to facilitate group processes to move an organization or team through transformational change. Non-scripted immersive learning environments allow complexity to occur and, thus, challenge participants to think laterally and be flexible and adaptable in their decision making processes. Second Life provides a wonderful platform for this to happen.

For more information: SL: Bev Lander, Human Mosaic Systems

Last year’s Solution Provider Exposition was an incredible success. Demand for more developer showcase opportunities continues to rise. With this is mind, the SP Exposition Working Group takes great pleasure in announcing the grand opening of a permanent Solution Provider Exposition!

Second Life developers have provided innovative answers to some of enterprise’s newest questions. The SP Exposition will highlight companies that provide in-world experiential services and solutions to real-world businesses using the Second Life platform.

The SP Exposition opened on Jan 25th, 2010. It offers you opportunity to:

• View examples and case studies of successful enterprise, government, and educational projects
• Attend presentations and other developer activities
• Check out recent projects and opportunities

The Solution Provider Exposition will focus on the full array of Second Life Solution Provider services and provide insight into successful real-world projects on the Second Life platform. It will also communicate the concepts used for a variety of applications such as training, simulation, meetings, education, and more.

This admission-free virtual trade show is available year round and is open to the public. We encourage you to visit the Solution Provider Exposition Website for more information.

If you are a Solution Provider and would like to learn how to participate, click here.

If you are a Solution Provider and have specific questions regarding participation, please email the SPConference Manager at spconference.manager (at) gmail dot com or use the Contact Us form at www.spexposition.com

If you are interested in learning more about the Solution Provider Program, please visit this site.

We hope to see you there!

A few weeks ago, when the Scott & Miller press release was published, entitled, “Ad Agency Uses Second Life as Design and Presentation Tool for Client, The Dow Chemical Co.," I had five people independently send it to me saying, “This would make a great blog post.” I agreed and immediately reached out to Robert Emory, the Art Director of Interactive Media at Scott & Miller. (Turns out, he had already emailed us about the news, too.)

The story is a simple, but powerful one. Dow Chemical purchased a large sponsorship at one of their most important trade shows, the 2009 National Plastics Exposition in Chicago. Their sponsorship included an enormous exhibit space—a 36,000 square-foot ballroom and Scott & Miller, as their marketing agency of record, were asked to design the space. Now, 36,000 square feet is a very large space that needed to be thoughtfully planned, from an experience design perspective. So, the Scott & Miller team decided to build a prototype of several concepts in Second Life and walk the client through to evaluate the layout and design. The end result is that there were no surprises—for anyone involved—and the entire event was a huge success, in great part to Scott & Miller’s innovative use of Second Life as a prototyping and experience design platform in this client engagement. Robert and I chatted about his experience here’s how it went. And, there's a pop quiz at the end--so pay attention.

Amanda: You have successfully designed spaces for clients many times before in other mediums. So, why did you choose to prototype Dow Chemical's National Plastics Expo space in Second Life?
Robert: It was the scale and scope of the space that made us want to find a different way to present concepts to the clients. 36,000 square feet, with multiple graphic walls, and the various other structures and furnishings presented challenges to ensuring graphic unity and uninterrupted floor plan flow. Visitors to Dow's customer center would be seeing the space from numerous angles and we needed to account for all of them so that the final product contributed to a unique and positive experience. Now that we've seen the value of using Second Life in this way, we will use it to help design and present other event spaces, large or small.

Amanda: How did you work with the Dow Chemical client to make key experience design decisions and how was SL useful for your internal agency team?
Robert: The beauty of Second Life vs. other more traditional design and presentation methods, is that it allowed all parties involved (from clients to exhibit and graphic production suppliers) to come into the room together to review various graphic options, collaborate on possible room layout improvements, and most importantly to see those options unfold before their eyes -- no waiting a day or two for us to collect all of the feedback, re-render a static depiction, and then re-convene. With our design and building capabilities in Second Life (and of course some pre-planning and design prior to presentation), we were able to make changes on the fly. Clients could review and compare all of the possibilities and make well-informed decisions. In addition, clients could have as many "second thoughts" as they wanted during the design development phase of the project. They could log in at their convenience without the agency breathing down their neck to thoroughly evaluate decisions they had already made or that needed to be made.

The benefit to us internally was twofold: SL helped us visualize the designs (just like it helped the client) so that we could make sound decisions and recommendations, and it gave us a great way to illustrate to the clients exactly how the room could and would look in its final form. Agencies are always looking to add value for their clients. This application of SL allowed us to do just that.

Amanda: Very interesting. Looking back, what was the most interesting surprise and were you able to identify any tangible ROI?
Robert: Maybe not so much a "surprise," but I did feel a "wow" moment when I walked into the real customer center. It was eerie (in a good way) how dead-on the virtual world was to the finished space. That really gets at the heart of why this use of SL was so successful. There were no surprises. By the time we were ready to "hit the print button," we were confident about what the result would be. There was no walking into the actual customer center and thinking, "I wish we would have thought of that," or "That section could have been better; but oh well, it is what it is." The peace-of-mind benefit was huge—for both the client and us.

ROI would be difficult to quantify based on this particular application of SL. Did it save a trip across country that would have otherwise been needed? Probably. Did it save multiple trips? Maybe. Did it translate into more sales for the client? In this particular case, I think the leap to correlate the two is far too big. Here's what I do know: SL helped us to plan, design, and create the backdrop for a memorable customer experience, one that led to sales and strengthened relationships. Would that have happened if we hadn't used SL for this project? Likely, yes. Did we get a better end result with SL. Absolutely, yes.

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After spending over 10+ years in the digital/maketing services business, I can tell ya. Sometimes the best ROI of all is peace of mind that you did your absolute best for your client—and they are pleased with the result.

Huge thanks to Robert at Scott & Miller for taking the time to chat, sharing their photos of the real and virtual space, and creating an excellent machinima to really give you all a good sense for the project.

So, pop quiz... Which image is the real life and which is Second Life?

Top one is real life and the bottom one is Second Life. Ok, that was fun. Try one more.

The top one is Second Life and the bottom one is real life.

Ok, pop quiz over. How did you do?

Looking forward to your comments.