In my last post I suggested that simply copying and pasting the real world into a virtual environment is likely not enough to optimize virtual world collaboration. Sun Microsystems is a company that seems to understand this and is utilizing the company’s virtual world in an interesting way. Rather than make everything a carbon-copy of the real world, Sun is creating a mashup of the physical world with the virtual world.

Sun’s virtual world, known as MPK20, allows remote workers (which Sun website estimates at up to 50% of their workforce on any given day) to meet and collaborate in a virtual space. Employees create avatars which can then interact with other employees either formally or informally. Employees can share documents and work on them simultaneously or have collaborative discussions and meetings.

But employees can see more than other avatars in MPK20. Using Sun’s Porta-Person hardware, images from the real world can be projected into the virtual world. So, during a business meeting, the people that have come to meet in the virtual world, can look into the conference room where people who are in the same place in the physical world are also meeting. The Porta-Person can be rotated and controlled by someone within the virtual world to change the image that appears to the group. People in the physical space can have a view into the virtual world through the Porta-Person display screen as well.

Sun says it is taking steps toward more mixed-reality interaction. They forecast “more adaptable spaces by breaking the laws of physics and fixed geometry.” While in some ways, MPK20 is still based on a virtual version of the physical world, Sun seems to be heading in innovative directions that virtual team leaders should be paying attention to. I believe that such innovations may be necessary if leaders of virtual teams wish to see benefits from the use of virtual worlds for collaboration. My research with Betsy Carroll, Rui Huang, and Surinder Kahai, in which we compared virtual team collaboration in Second Life to collaboration supported by instant messaging, is suggesting that simply emulating face-to-face meetings in virtual worlds may not be beneficial at all.