Virtual Meetings
Second Life has created a professional, easy-to-use method on-line meeting space that participants can attend from the comfort of their office, home or even their yacht!
Virtual meetings not only cut travel expenses and environmental impact, but provide the flexibility to work with people in a real-time environment regardless of their location.
Practical Matters
For a fraction of the cost, virtual functions like meetings, training events, product releases and seminars can all be conducted on-line. From major companies like IBM to small enterprises expanding their territory, smart businesses are using Second Life to find innovative solutions to the challenge of communicating simultaneously with participants all over the globe.
A Second Life meeting contains many of the fundamental elements of a face-to-face meeting, a factor that can be hard to recreate using video or conference calls. For one thing, all the avatars for participants are visible, making it easy to tell just who is present at the meeting and who is currently speaking.
Conference Rooms
The virtual meeting room contains many features of a regular conference room. Services include a sound system for amplyfying speakers and a viewing screen where you can run videos, slide shows or power point presentations that everyone in attendence can view.
Translations
One of the big attractions of Second Life for international business meetings is the many translation programs that are offered to make the kind of important real-time translations that cut down on confusion and misunderstandings.
These services use instant text translation programs that allow you to read the on-going dialog and save the verbatim transcripts for later consideration.
InWorld
The ability to invite interested parties to panel discussions, affiliation meetings and informative lectures is greatly expanded because it is fairly simple for attendees to sign on with Second Life and create their avatars.
To assist anyone having issues with attending a Second Life event, many businesses have a help desk avatar available outside the meeting rooms to help troubleshoot individual issues so the whole meeting is not interrupted and can stay productive.
Another advantage of virtual meetings is that they can be recorded in their entirety and replayed later for the benefit of those who had timing conflicts with the original presentation.
Mixing
Participants in a virtual meeting can ask questions of each other, request clarification on a topic or participate in panel discussions. They can also chat together before and after the meeting, which creates opportunities for members to virtually meet for the first time or “run into” previous acquaintances and renew relationships.
After the meeting, notes can be posted on a virtual bulletin board to announce similar events, related information or post invitations to discuss the topics brought up at the virtual meeting.
Tags: second life