Watching humans watching avatars - a mixed world event

Last night, PA Consulting Group staged a launch party for their presence in Second Life.

The highlight of the event was Berkeley-based Andreas Kluth's avatar, "Pat Parker", appearing on a big screen to speak about Second Life. (Andreas Kluth is the author of the September 2006 in-depth article on Second Life in The Economist.) While only a dozen avatars were present in the virtual conference room, the speaker held the attention of close to a hundred people gathered at the (real life) London venue.

The illusion of presence was a success. I have been to conferences where a speaker's voice has been transmitted to the room, but without a visual focal point the minds of the audience started to wander and attention waned. Not so with a Second Life avatar appearing human and alive by employing basic body language (the avatar shifted his stance from time to time but his mouth was not moving).

If virtual world to real world interaction seems to work, in-world interaction is a more powerful experience. Claus Nehmzow, who leads PA's Second Life initiative, admitted that he had never met, in real life, the people who designed and built PA's virtual office. When it was decided to hire a receptionist to greet people at the virtual PA office, interviews were conducted in Second Life. He joked that he was waiting to find out what would happen when the human resources department discovers that he has hired a person without knowing their real name and that the receptionist avatar is being paid in Linden Dollars, the virtual world currency.

PA hopes to use their new Second Life presence to advise clients about both virtual and real-world initiatives. The latter could be branch design for retail banks where different models can be tried out at low cost in a virtual environment.

Previous articles about Second Life on mind this:
The rush to Second Life is like the internet in the mid-1990s
Virtual land lease in Second Life
It is not a game

Tags: Second Life PA Consulting Group consulting avatar presence

Comments

[SCK]

tres cool, very bleeding edge, but then again there are probably no edges in Second Life.