"The IT industry and regulatory agencies can, and should, make virtual worlds a safer space in cyberspace by addressing their limitations and leveraging their unique features. It’s time to act. If work in progress in this area is any guide, I believe that in five years virtual worlds will be a better and safer place for a range of personal and business applications than they are now."

Opening Statement

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

Virtual worlds are brave new worlds on the Web. These 3D, interactive Web environments can deliver an immersive experience that is much richer than what we currently experience with the traditional Web. As a result, virtual worlds are emerging as communal places for a wide range of activities -- gaming, social networking, education and training, marketing, and e-business.^1-3 Virtual worlds are a hot topic among both users and businesses eager to exploit and embrace the new worlds.

Major businesses and large marketers are using virtual worlds in innovative ways to appeal to the hard-to-reach "digital natives" -- young consumers of the digital generation -- who spend much of their time using computers and mobile phones. IT departments in many enterprises are now being asked to explore how their organizations can embrace virtual worlds and create, deploy, regulate, and monitor these new applications.

As virtual worlds begin to move from the fringe to the mainstream, there is considerable excitement, as well as hype, surrounding the movement. A key question is, what real value do virtual worlds present to users and businesses? While the value may be obvious to some, there are several issues associated with virtual worlds that cause varying degrees of anxiety among stakeholders. These concerns -- which range from usability, performance, and security to taxation and moral and legal issues -- limit the potential of virtual worlds and hinder their adoption.

NEXT BIG THING -- OR NEXT BIG BUST?

Thus, organizations and investors are asking, "Do virtual worlds represent a new Internet revolution, or are they simply the next bubble to burst?" Some argue that virtual worlds are here to stay. Indeed more people -- from kids to teens to adults to even "mature" users -- are spending an increasing amount of time in virtual worlds, playing games, communicating with friends, creating virtual artifacts, studying, undergoing training, conducting real estate transactions, buying virtual artifacts, and/or establishing businesses. According to some estimates, multibillion-dollar opportunities might be there for the taking in the virtual-world arena. As a result, major IT companies, startups, public relation companies, marketers, consultancies, educational institutions, and individuals are all trying to get a slice of the seemingly vast business potential that virtual worlds offer. Several IT companies have begun developing virtual-world applications, tools, and platforms.

As of now, however, virtual worlds are at a nascent stage. Some virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) are plagued by poor reliability and performance, and consequently will not provide an adequate platform for organizations that require a production-level environment. Key issues involving security, identity management, taxation, and regulation of financial transactions have yet to be resolved. These challenges will have to be addressed before we can fully harness the power of virtual worlds.

So is the Web poised for its next major evolution or not? According to the Association of Virtual Worlds, the answer (not surprisingly) is "yes." The association, whose mission is "to serve those companies and individuals who are dedicated to the advancement of this multibillion-dollar global industry and reach out to those who have not yet found virtual worlds," declares that "virtual worlds represent a major information and technological revolution in how we work, play, and live."⁴ Others argue that virtual worlds are going to have more and more real-life applications that will affect all of us. As the Metaverse Roadmap asserts, "There are unique opportunities for enlightened corporate, political, and social leadership in Metaverse [virtual world] exploration and development."⁵ In their view, improving foresight in this space is both a wise business strategy and a broad social good.

A JOURNEY INTO VIRTUAL WORLDS

We begin this issue with an article by San Murugesan, an academic and founder of Metaverse Labs, who starts with a piece of advice. He asserts that IT managers need to be both conservative and innovative -- while keeping the older systems and current processes functioning smoothly, they have to continually examine how the business can benefit from new IT technologies. Sivan defines a "real" virtual world as an aggregate of four factors -- a 3D world plus community, creation, and commerce (yielding "3D3C") -- and then assesses currently popular virtual worlds via the 3D3C prism. As the 3D3C factors continue to boost innovations, Sivan predicts, virtual worlds will in due course become a "game-changing" technology like the Internet before them. To illustrate this, he takes us on a journey into future scenarios of virtual worlds, showing the 3D3C factors in action. To help IT managers embrace virtual worlds, he concludes by presenting an agenda for action.

Making the transition from the traditional 2D Web to the 3D Web is the topic of our next article, contributed by Savvas Papagiannidis of the Newcastle University Business School (UK). He discusses metaverse retailing -- that is, retailing that takes place in online virtual worlds -- and suggests that it can bridge the gap between real-world "High Street" retailing and Web-based electronic retailing. Papagiannidis examines two kinds of metaverse retailing -- the creation and sale of virtual goods and the peddling of real-world products in the metaverse. Virtual worlds that have real money trading provisions, such as Second Life, allow entrepreneurs to develop and sell a range of digital goods. Vendors of physical, real-world products, on the other hand, may find that "virtual worlds can help put back the missing atmospherics in the retail experience, which have hitherto been lost in online shopping."

In our next article, Matthew Ganis, Garrett Hall, and David McNeill from ibm.com's Virtual Business Center team in Second Life demonstrate how virtual worlds can serve as real-world sales tools. They note that "the traditional Web is good at information dissemination, but it does not provide the richness and dimensions found in virtual worlds." Then they outline how IBM's Virtual Business Center outgrew mere attention-getting tactics (e.g., offering virtual cappuccino) to become a full-fledged technology showcase that effectively -- and cost effectively -- demonstrates the company's most complex enterprise solutions to prospective clients across the globe. They advocate using virtual worlds to allow sales teams to demonstrate complex solutions, where they previously could not, and to interact with a distributed client base in a more intimate way than previously possible. They identify the current barriers that inhibit broader adoption of virtual worlds and suggest how those barriers could possibly be overcome.

As a professor of management at Southeastern Louisiana University and founding editor of the Journal of Strategic e-Commerce, David C. Wyld is well placed to comment on the potential of virtual worlds in education and training. In our next article, he argues that training and education in the 21st century must be more geared to the learning styles of the "digital native" generation. Wyld suggests that this could be accomplished through the use of "serious games," environments specifically designed for teaching, training, and learning. He further explains why online games and virtual worlds are well suited to leadership and management training, as they provide what one observer calls a "social laboratory where role-playing, simulations, exploration, and experimentation can be tried out in a relatively risk-free environment."

Though virtual worlds offer value, and you can immerse yourself in them for pleasure, shopping, learning, or social networking, you can't go there to escape from some real-world problems. In our final article, Anjali Kaushik, associate professor at the Management Development Institute in Gurgaon, India, shows us the dark side of virtual worlds -- including avatar harassment, phishing attacks, and even money laundering. In addition, she notes that "platform instability and security issues continue to cause service unreliability and interruptions in some virtual worlds." Kaushik identifies virtual world issues and risks such as identity management, confidentiality, and integrity of communications that are not currently addressed adequately. She cautions us that virtual worlds -- despite their recent popularity and the surge of user and business interest in them -- remain in an embryonic state. She also suggests what your organization can do to manage its presence in a virtual world.

EMBRACING VIRTUAL WORLDS: AN OPPORTUNITY AND A CHALLENGE

As you can see, the five articles we present in this issue together offer a balanced view of virtual worlds, discussing both the key features and benefits of virtual worlds while also examining the challenges in fielding virtual-world applications. I hope these articles will inform and provoke you, and present useful ideas and insights that you can make use of.

Virtual worlds offer great promise and enable us to deploy novel applications that were not possible with the traditional 2D Web, but as with any new technology, they also pose some limitations and risks. It is our task to embrace the opportunities virtual worlds offer, while safeguarding against their risks by devising new measures as required. The IT industry and regulatory agencies can, and should, make virtual worlds a safer space in cyberspace by addressing their limitations and leveraging their unique features. It's time to act. If work in progress in this area is any guide, I believe that in five years virtual worlds will be a better and safer place for a range of personal and business applications than they are now.

I hope this issue of Cutter IT Journal inspires you and your organization to plunge into virtual worlds, if you haven't already, always balancing the benefits and risks.

The dialogue I envisage is ... a dialogue between two voices, the one imaginative and the other critical.

You create opportunities by asking for them.

ENDNOTES

¹ Murugesan, San. "Harnessing the Power of Virtual Worlds: Exploration, Innovation, and Transformation -- Part I and Part II." Cutter Business Intelligence Executive Report, Vol. 8, Nos. 3 and 5, March and May 2008.

²The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds. Association of Virtual Worlds, 2008.

³The Green Book: A Business Guide to Virtual Worlds. Association of Virtual Worlds, 2008.

⁴ "Mission Statement." Association of Virtual Worlds, 2008 (www.associationofvirtualworlds.com/about_us.php#mission_statement).

⁵ Smart, John et al. "Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web." Metaverse Roadmap, 2007 (www.metaverseroadmap.org/MetaverseRoadmapOverview.pdf).

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