Corporate use of Second Life

Title: Corporate use of Second Life
Authors: 
Venue: Wikipedia
Year: unknown
Canonical: wiki:corporate-use-of-second-life
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_use_of_Second_Life
Collector: wikipedia
OA: true

ABSTRACT
Virtual worlds are 3D computer environments where each user is represented with a character known as an avatar. Traditionally, virtual worlds have been used for entertainment. However, starting from approximately 2004 both corporate world and academia started to recognize business value of virtual worlds for training and education, collaboration, and marketing. Development and maturity of the virtual world Second Life played a significant role in corporate movement towards virtual worlds for several reasons:Second Life was the first public virtual world that did not offer any topic, or theme. Each user is free to create their own objects, personalized environment, and/or to hold any events of their choice. This immediately sparked the idea of creating meeting rooms and virtual classrooms, first within academia, quickly followed by corporate users. Later, meetings and events developed into more advanced uses, from training simulations and communication training using robotic avatars, to 3D visualization, prototyping and collaboration From 2005 to 2007 Second Life experienced rapid growth of the userbase. Companies were eager to reach this potential customer base and started marketing programs in Second Life. Without a good plan, knowledge of the audience and without good understanding of the new medium many of the early corporate marketing efforts failed, producing a backlash against corporate adoption of virtual worlds. Second Life provided a wide array of tools for building 3D objects, scripting language to apply required behavior to the objects and easy entry path.