Future Workspaces » virtual world

Virtual Worlds to support the Nomadic Worker

external author — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:16:27 +0000

During the projectday one workshop was used to discuss the feasibility of virtual worlds for nomadic working. We see a growing group of nomadic workers, as work is not fixed solely to the office anymore. Increasingly people are working from home or the customer. Besides organizational problems, like planning of resources and projects also personal problems for nomadic workers arise. For example, keeping in touch and in sync with your colleauges and team members becomes more complex. One possible way to deal with these complexities is by using virtual worlds. This workshop was used to play with two virtual world demonstrations and to discuss the merits and drawbacks of this type of technology for nomadic workers.

The participants of the workshop were divided into two groups. One group played with the Virtual Media Office demonstration, prepared by Sefan Burgers from Ericsson. The second group played with the Second Life demonstration, prepared by Bart van den Hooff of the VU.

The result was a nice discussion from which the following elements struck me:

Staying in touch with colleagues can be facilitated using virtual worlds however currently it cannot complete replace face to face contact. For example, drinking coffee at a coffee corner is still very valuable. Maybe a good virtual coffee machine could be a way to go.
Choosing (remote) team members using virtual worlds could become more objective as politics and personal aspects play a lesser role.
Virtual worlds (including avatars) could become a intuitive graphical interface on top of the resources of a worker.
A lot of workers use tools with a lot of (unintuitive) features (e.g. email), virtual worlds could provide a intuitive interface that discloses all these features in a more natural way, after a learning curve has been taken.
Not all tasks of a knowledge worker may be suitable to perform in a virtual world (e.g. editing excel).
The more important decisions become, the more face to face contact is needed to also grasp indirect communication aspects (e.g. body language). Current virtual worlds are less suitable to grasp indirect communications and hence may be less suitable for very important/delicate decisions.

Mike from Jam visualized outcomes of the discussion. More of the results (also from the other workshops) can be found here.

Decision Making in Virtual Worlds: An Experiment

external author — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:08:02 +0000

Last year, an experiment was conducted at the VU University to determine what the role of virtual worlds could be in geographically distributed decision making processes. Virtual worlds have been receiving a lot of media attention over the past year, and people in organizations increasingly have experience in various virtual environments. Still, we are in the dark about the potential value of these environments for organizations. Combined with the fact that people in organizations increasingly work geographically dispersed, and independent of time and location, this triggered us to consider the possibilities of virtual worlds as group decision support systems.Our aim was to study the contribution of virtual worlds to geographically dispersed team decision making in terms of both facilitating (and improving) the interaction between participants, and improving the quality of the decision being reached. Not that important now, but I think we could better frame this in terms of communication/interaction and information gathering/processing. Improving the decision being reached is an outcome, while facilitating interaction concerns the process (see presentation) In order to be able to do this, we compared decision making in virtual worlds (we used Second Life for our experiment) to decision making that was supported by a purely text-based chat functionality. This would enable us to determine the added value of the visualization that virtual worlds offer in terms of both interaction and decision making.

The decision process that was central in the experiment focused on a spatial decision problem. A team had to make a decision on the use of a vacant piece of land situated in an urban area. The virtual world of Second Life was used to create a virtual image of an urban area.

Group Decision Making in Second Life

Participants in the experiment were 240 students of Business Administration, randomly assigned to teams of 3 persons. Participants were unaware of who their team mates were as they were placed in different rooms.

Based on information they were given beforehand, teams were asked to decide what to do with the vacant piece of land. After reaching their decision, they were asked to fill out a survey in which a number of relevant variables concerning their interaction and decision making were measured. The results provide a number of interesting insights into the added value of virtual worlds for distributed group decision making, in terms of both interaction and decision quality. As the experiment will be continued in 2009 with people working in organizations, we cannot provide any more information on the results here – unfortunately…

Conducting this experiment has been a very valuable experience, providing interesting conclusions as to how people may collaborate through virtual environments. It has also provided us with interesting insights in terms of how to conduct such an experiment – insights which will be incorporated into the follow-up experiment to be conducted in 2009!

The researchers: Frans Feldberg, Alexander Schouten & Bart van den Hooff,
VU University Amsterdam,
Faculty of Economics and Business Administration,
Section Knowledge, Information & Networks

Using virtual environments to perform knowledge work

external author — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:08:04 +0000

At the moment Sun is experimenting with Project Wonderland, a virtual workspace where employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using voice communication. Fortunately, they recognize that knowledge workers frequently collaborate over shared objects (presentations, drawings, documents). Unlike for instance the Second Life environment, Project Wonderland allows knowledge workers to share their applications, although it now only allows sharing Java and X applications.

Within Future Workspaces, a team of researchers from the Free University in Amsterdam is investigating decision making processes in virtual environments. Keep an eye on their publications!

Brainstorm Organizr

Ruud Janssen — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:14:13 +0000

A typical brainstorming session produces a handful of flipover sheets with tons of sticky notes on them, that is, until they all start to come loose! Ideal as this may be for storming your mind and structuring your ideas, it is certainly not a good format to keep your results until a follow-up session. Transcribing the results is cumbersome and, like taking a picture, it freezes the results instead of making them accessible for future sessions.

Enter the Brainstorm Organizr, a smartboard application that uses speech-to-text input in addition to freehand writing and sketching to produce text and drawings on virtual sticky notes. These notes can be moved around just like their physical counterparts, using multi-touch or even arm gestures, to create categories or clusters. When you’re done storming your mind, the results are stored and immediately accessible for the next session.

VR office

Ruud Janssen — Mon, 26 May 2008 11:57:07 +0000

The VR office is a virtual reality room where you and your team can work in a simulated environment adapted to your needs or simply to your liking. Display devices and speakers are invisibly integrated into the physical environment. Landscape, soundtrack, and synthesized smell can be matched to create the perfect environment for creative sessions, deep reflection, or concentrated individual work.