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By Simon Fuller. Online sharing. It’s time to brand the virtual world. That’s why UK-based Corporation Pop is making use of the Second Life platform providing a secure place for folk to meet and communicate. So, even when individuals are hundreds of miles apart, they can almost shake hands thanks to their virtual avatars.
The environments Corporation Pop creates can be used for anything from team training and game-based learning to consultations and ceremonies. And they include nifty extras like embedded external video, as well as voice technology.
“Essentially what we do focuses largely on the corporate and education sectors,” says Dom Raban, md at Corporation Pop. “Our main aim with virtual worlds is to use them as the perfect place to bring teams together – people in different parts of the world who can’t travel [for example].
“Whereas on Second Life normally, the viewer is generic, we brand the viewer instead of using the generic environments. So we have Second Life technology, but accessed in a locked-down environment – it’s a walled garden.”
The applications of these branded environments can be pretty varied. Corporation Pop’s work with BP, for example, found a solution to a problem – the brand had senior project managers located all over the globe, who were about to complete a distance-learning project management course and wanted to conclude their studies with a ceremony. But with flying each manager into one place a costly option – not to mention wreaking havoc with their carbon footprints – the event was recreated within the virtual environment, with each manager logging on together to participate.
Second-year students at Manchester’s Metropolitan University will also soon be getting a taste of virtual worlds, as Corporation Pop is developing game-based learning for a film studies course, enabling participants to complete whole modules of their course entirely in a virtual world.
“The main advantage [of virtual worlds] is the sense of shared experience,” Raban explains. “When you interact with an avatar, you feel like you’re sharing space with others. [Meanwhile], when you use a chat room or video conferencing, you are keeping a different space. And true voice communications, as opposed to typing, is another thing that adds to the sense of shared experience.”
And Corporation Pop reckons that while the time might not be ripe just yet for virtual worlds to be used to their full potential when it comes to marketing, the platform’s time is nigh.
“When it comes to brands within the space, when Second Life appeared, there was a buzz around it, and brands dipped their toes in,” says Raban. “Almost all brands who did so found it a painful experience, as at that point there weren’t the volumes of people to provide a return on the investment.
“[But] of all the millions of virtual world users in the world, 39% are under 15,” he adds. “In five years’ time, a generation of people will be in place for whom virtual worlds aren’t new-fangled – [virtual worlds] will be embedded in their culture for them, just as say, Google is for us. It will be a natural space for them. I think brands will re-enter the marketplace then.”