Second Life: A Lot Like Kindergarten

That's not because the developers and devotees of those worlds are childish -- far from it -- but because basics of interpersonal relationships are still being worked out there.

As businesses expand in those 3-D online environments, the potential for squabbling grows.

Culture Shock

For starters, serious-minded corporate users of virtual worlds don't fit easily with the free spirits, flashy avatars and fantasy landscapes of many online 3-D environments.

"Someone could fly in to where I am now and start dancing erotically," said Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) network architect Christian Renaud, speaking from Silicon Valley to the technology panel in Irvine where his Second Life avatar was projected on the front wall.

The solution to that problem is as simple as keeping the big kids on a different playground from the kindergarteners.

Basic Social Rules

Deeper rifts stem from fundamental uncertainties about roles and rules when people get together online. Yet even those difficulties are much like relationship problems that first crop up in kindergarten.

In a panel discussion sponsored by the OCTANe innovation-boosting group last week at UC-Irvine, experts in virtual worlds explored key issues that matter to businesses:

• Verifiable identities
• Control
• Intellectual property
• Rules of conduct

Those are grown-up variations of the issues that children deal with on the playground when they say:

• "What's your name?"
• "Keep out."
• "It's mine."
• "Obey the rules."

Speakers on the panel included Renaud from Cisco in San Jose, Calif.; Crista Lopes, a UC-Irvine computer sciences professor who uses a Second Life simulation to test software for a real-world transit system; online market researcher Mary Ellen Gordon from Market Truths in New Zealand; and Denis Browne, a senior vice president of SAP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. The moderator was Linda Zimmer, an Orange, Calif.-based consultant at MarCom:Interactive who advises corporations about virtual worlds.

"Identity is a big issue for businesses," especially when they use virtual worlds for recruiting, Zimmer said.

"Kelly Services and Tmp.worldwide recruit on Second Life. People sign up for interviews on the Web and are interviewed in virtual space, avatar to avatar," she said.

The ID Rub

However, Second Life requires a type of anonymity. Visitors must choose from names that Linden Lab supplies. Revealing someone's real-world identify can be grounds for expulsion.

After the panel discussion, online entrepreneur Yu-kai Chou, founder of Los Angeles-based Future Delivery, described a solution his company plans to use in a corporate recruiting site. To discourage misrepresentations, users will have to provide a credit card number or an e-mail address from a corporation or educational institution, he said.

Lopes said visitors should be able to move from one virtual world to another with a common password. But so far online worlds have adopted "one of the worst things about the Web," she said -- requiring users to keep track of multiple passwords.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li predicts common passwords will be adopted within five years.

Blurring Borders

Software developers in the Virtual Worlds Interoperability Forum are working toward standards that could make that possible, Renaud told the panel.

"With interoperability, my avatar would be able to walk from Second Life into the company's intranet, have a staff meeting there, and then come back to Second Life," he said.

Many virtual environments are based on proprietary software, as Linden Lab of San Francisco chose to do when it launched Second Life in 2003.

Lopes pleaded for a new, open structure to allow software developers to make improvements.

"It's set up all wrong and needs to be changed," she said. "It should be more like the Web, which no one controls."

Open It Up

One way to accomplish that is an open-source software platform, such as the one used by the OpenSim network of virtual worlds, which is run out of Irvine.

Should virtual worlds be open to outsiders or be protected behind a corporate firewall? That's the fundamental difference between corporate 3-D environments and publicly accessible ones.

Renaud said corporations need control of virtual worlds they use for training and conferencing. One example occurred recently when Cisco failed to deactivate the account of an employee who was terminated on a Friday, he said. Over the weekend, the ex-employee's avatar in Second Life was "running around partly clad, sexually harassing people."

Are virtual worlds so fundamentally different from daily life that new rules are needed? Or are they simply a new type of communication tool, which means that existing standards for behavior still apply?

Lawyers debated that question at this month's Virtual Worlds Conference in New York.

In last week's panel, Browne said real-world issues such as sexual harassment mean that "lawyers will be very happy" because of the proliferation of virtual environments as business tools, he said.

Renaud disagreed. Cisco treats virtual worlds as an alternate form of communication, which keeps things simple, he said.

Behave Yourself

When Cisco launched virtual worlds for training and conferencing, he said, "We wrote a code of avatar conduct right away."

But those rules for the virtual world are essentially the same as Cisco's rules for the physical workplace: "You don't tell dirty jokes. You don't walk around naked in a business meeting."

After all, Renaud said, "You don't have separate codes of conduct for meetings and for phone calls."

Addressing the issues of virtual worlds is important because businesses are increasingly using 3-D online environments for training, marketing , recruiting, and conferencing. That leads to more varied uses of online worlds, with a potential for different rules of behavior for each one.

Testing the Waters

Already more than 170 companies, including corporations such as Coke, Mazda, Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) , IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) have set up shop in Second Life and other virtual worlds, Zimmer said.

Some companies such as American Apparel, AOL and Pontiac were disappointed by their early experiences in Second Life and pulled out, Zimmer said, but Disney (NYSE: DIS) is building four virtual worlds of its own and plans to launch them this year.

SAP is developing 3-D virtual-world simulations to train oil-rig workers in evacuation procedures and to track refinery employees, who wear GPS devices, Browne said.

The company is also exploring virtual worlds as a way to make SAP's business-control software more appealing to young adults who are joining the work force, he said. After seeing SAP's traditional user interface, "They say, 'You've got to be kidding. I'm not going to use this," " Browne told the panel. "Our clients have a problem with retention. Younger employees just refuse to use it."

Growing Population

Counts of people who visit Second Life and its smaller counterparts such as There.com, Gaia Online and HiPiHi are unreliable. Estimates range from a total of 30 million to more than 200 million, Zimmer said, even though the Second Life welcome page on Monday afternoon tallied only 55,000 people who were then logged on and a total of 1.2 million visitors within the past 60 days.

The Forrester research group forecasts that within five years 3-D worlds will be as important a business tool as the Web is today.

Within three years, 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies and an equal proportion of frequent Internet users will be active in 3-D environments, according to the Gartner (NYSE: IT) market research company.