A new report from Forrester Research is encouraging businesses to consider virtual worlds as a necessary next step in helping collaboration among team members and businesses. Reports such as this strengthen my conviction that, just as the Internet revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate with each other, virtual worlds and the 3D world wide web will soon have the same transformational effects on the way we communicate and collaborate. Forrester predicts that the 3D web will, in five years, be as important for work as today’s web. This is a world in which employees and team members might use a custom avatar to communicate with each other in graphically enhanced virtual worlds or web spaces. Currently, virtual worlds such as Second Life, or Sun’s MPK20, and 3D web programs such as 3B, give us a feel for what the 3D Web might look like.

Forrester’s report says that now is the time to begin investigating and trying to understand virtual world use for collaboration. I agree with this wholeheartedly. Our research team, consisting of Surinder Kahai, Rui Huang, Betsy Carroll and myself have been investigating team collaboration in virtual worlds for the past year and a half. In that time we have conducted two studies in which we have tried to understand the effectiveness of collaboration in virtual worlds. Our original supposition was that the added channels of communication in virtual worlds, namely visual representations of participants and being able to hear sounds in the meeting space, would enable team members to communicate in a more personalized way and allow for quicker understanding among the group’s members. The increased understanding would then translate into better quality work and to better relationships among the team members. In other words, as many others have predicted, we thought that in many ways virtual worlds would be inherently “better” for virtual collaboration.

We conducted our studies with small groups who were assigned a leader and a managerial task, similar to one managers might face in an organization. Our goal was to get a better understanding of what adding the visual representation of a person with an avatar, allowing for some body language through the avatar, and giving the meeting a “physical” space would do to group perceptions of the meeting and how satisfied they would be with the collaboration process and outcome. Additionally, we wanted to know if the added visual dimensions of virtual worlds affected the way that group members talked with each other and conducted their group task. Our studies also looked at leadership behaviors in the virtual teams to see if specific leader behaviors impacted the groups’ decision-making and satisfaction.

For both studies we found some expected results and also some unexpected results. We found that leadership behaviors affected the groups in much the way we expected based on previous literature on leadership, regardless of the environment. For example, a leader encouraging the team to finish in order to successfully complete the task lead to a shorter time to complete the task. (The time to complete it does not take into consideration the quality of the decisions made by the teams.) However, we found surprising results regarding collaboration in virtual worlds–some that contradict or don’t support the notion of virtual worlds being so much “better” than other methods available currently to virtual teams. The visual and audio aspects of the media don’t seem to have quite the influence on the group communication as has been talked about and expected. If I sound vague, please understand that we are continuing our research and need to be careful about the details we put out in a public forum so that future participants in our studies would not be swayed by our results. If you are interested in reading more about our results, please contact any of us by visiting the Binghamton University directory and finding our email and we will be happy to get back to you!

With unexpected results from our study, why do I think that 3D web technology and virtual worlds will be the next revolution in virtual collaboration? Because there is great potential in it that has yet to be discovered or understood. As I said in my first post, right now people are locked into a “cut and paste” use of virtual worlds where they superimpose the real world into a virtual one. An example is the people in Second Life who needlessly own virtual cars in a world where everyone can fly and teleport. As we collectively begin to explore and experience new ways of using the virtual worlds, we might see very different results. Our own initial studies described above used this cut and paste notion with a meeting room that looked like a typical meeting room in an office. Future studies will explore different uses and implementations of virtual worlds which might lead to very different results. Also, familiarity is a big factor that can’t be overlooked. The Internet didn’t have its influence over our communication overnight. It took some time for the use of Email and other web-based tools to catch on and for people to become accustomed to using them. As more and more people begin using these technologies, the more they will become embedded in our daily lives. We have a chance now to understand virtual worlds in collaboration so that our use of them can be much more effective as they become a more important part of our work.