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Global Employee Session in Mixed-Media, Enterprise-Integrated Virtual World
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Thanks to all for the comments and dialogue on the previous posts. Today, I'll get back to discussing technology, which is the real purpose of this blog. 
One of the goals that drives me and certainly one of the big challenges and opportunities for the industry is to figure out how we can achieve a better-than-reality communications experience through the use of technology.
I wanted to share with you an event that happened at Nortel this week that represents a step on that journey.
Yesterday, I held a global employee session within a virtual mixed-reality world, using a prototype platform we’re investigating as part of an incubation effort. We had 150+ people participating in the virtual environment, hundreds of others participating by congregating in real-world auditoriums or large meeting rooms (where they could see and hear on large screens what was happening in the virtual world, through the “eyes” and “ears” of one of the Avatars), and others participating from their desktops using more traditional web conferencing tools.
The experience was fantastic. I was able to present, dialogue with employees, and answer questions within the virtual world but also in a way that all of the employees using other more traditional mediums – audio and voice conferencing and sitting in auditoriums – could also be a part of.
What was different about this, versus doing a large company meeting in an environment like Second Life, is that a host of different technologies could be part of an integrated experience within Nortel’s own enterprise application architecture. Everything was linked to our telecom infrastructure, corporate security and identity management systems. In other virtual reality experiences, like Second Life or multi-player on-line gaming systems, you need to go into their footprint and are limited by their capabilities. For example, although a name may be attached to an Avatar, you have no way of really knowing who that individual is in the real world. Yesterday, the virtual experience (complete with high-quality spatial audio) became part of our own IT ecosystem.
There were a few minor glitches along the way – to be expected with any prototype – but it was successful and allowed us to accomplish the task of a quarterly update to a globally distributed work force. The reality of it also sparked a huge number of new potential applications and uses. In the model of learning by doing, this kind of real immersion into new systems is a critical path to future innovation.
Our goal is to create a better-than-reality communications experience through technology. Today that’s just not possible. During conference calls, unless you know the speaker’s voice, you can’t identify who is speaking. Although telepresence is a dramatic improvement to the teleconference, facilities are costly, not widely available, you have to be in a particular place at a particular time, and there are issues with scale.
Although today’s broadband networks are giving us the ability to put communications wherever we want to, if we simply put legacy communications paradigms into these mobile and extended environments, we won’t really solve the problems. What we need to do is to create something that allows an experience that is at least equivalent to – if not superior to – a real world experience anywhere the broadband network exists. So, step 1 is to build a broadband network. Step 2 is to improve the experience by including all of those attributes that make the human-to-human experience exciting and effective.
That’s why much of our research and next-generation investment is focused on this area – identifying what makes the real-world experience special and effective and then replicating those capabilities through technology.
In that respect, I’d love your input. What is it about the real-world face-to-face experience that makes it a superior one over any technological experience that exists today? Is it visual? Emotive? Spatial? Dynamic? Simple? Transparent? Etc. And what are the technologies that you think could help replicate that experience?
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