It's your first day. Laboratory technician in a large pharmaceutical multinational. He will work in Madrid, his boss in Paris and the human resources director in New York. And no one can be in person to receive it. How to show him the technical instruments that he must use daily, where they are stored, what the procedures for use are and, in addition, give him the obligatory introductory walk around the office? It will be enough to connect to the virtual world of the company, where buildings, laboratories and equipment are exact replicas of real ones and animated people are perfect 3D graphics. Fast, cheap and effective.
This is the future of business collaboration, according to IBM researchers at the European R&D center in Zurich, Switzerland. There, dozens of computer engineers, programmers and usability experts work on projects such as merging cats and virtual worlds, design gaming platforms online to promote leadership or use 3D technologies in medical diagnoses.
Many of these pilots use the OpenSim platform, an open standard promoted by IBM for the creation of virtual realities. Any programmer can download the free code and start their own planet online. A total of 80 developers in several countries have joined the initiative to extend OpenSim. In just one year they have managed to generate 38 grids with 5.000 interconnected servers that host the double life of 48.000 participants.
After the euphoria and subsequent disillusionment created around Second Life, which today exceeds 15,5 million residents, many experts considered how to take the next steps. Beyond pure entertainment, the adaptation of virtual worlds to collaboration in the company, training or teaching are consolidated as alternatives. But why opt for programs when video conferencing or phone calls work? "He chat and the telephone do not give you the advantage of the presence and gestures of your interlocutor, and with video conferencing you usually spend most of the meeting trying to make it work; "When you have people using Linux, Windows and Mac it's a nightmare," explains Dirk Husemann, head of the OpenSim project at the IBM R&D center in Zurich.
'Chat' and virtual worlds
Husemann leads a team of 20 people in Europe and the United States contributing to the creation of a 3D instant messaging system based on Lotus Sametime. The program assigns an avatar to each person, who gather in a room online and hold meetings, watch videos or presentations. Transparencies are loaded with a single click, whatever the format: Power Point, OpenOffice, Google Docs... And attendees can communicate by voice and chat without necessarily having to appear on the screen.
According to Husemann, it is a complement to existing collaboration tools, not a substitute. Some companies are already testing it. "If you can mix voice, video, chat and avatars and it works, it's an easy decision to make.
Still, many barriers remain to be resolved. Like acceptance, especially among senior managers. Not everyone is comfortable using virtual environments and talking to strange 3D characters that look like automatons. With the younger generations it will be different, although we will have to wait. Furthermore, there are the computers: most laptops and PCs do not yet have good graphics memory or powerful processors to use these applications. This problem will be resolved in a couple of years as processing capacity advances.
Security, as always, will be the most worrying factor. Is it safe to discuss confidential data and projects in Second Life, when all that information is circulating through Linden Lab's servers? "It is a huge concern, that is why grids own built in open source are the solution," explains Husemann. In other words: OpenSim aspires to become the standard for virtual reality.
Virtual and 3D medicine
Competition is significant, and that is always a sign of opportunity. There are nearly fifty alternatives with which to play, flirt and chat with friends.
From Habbo, with 10 million active subscribers, to Kaneva, Cyworld, Twinity, IMVU or Gaia Online. It's just a matter of time before some manage to find their way into the company.
The border between virtual worlds, avatars and 3D programs is very thin. Beyond collaboration in the company, its use can be infinite. IBM has devised a way to automate medical records in hospitals with them.
Instead of reading pages and pages of text on a computer, a three-dimensional avatar of the human body displays each patient's information. If a heart patient comes to the consultation, all you have to do is click on the corresponding organ to consult all the details: analysis results, operations and treatments will appear in order on the screen.
"It's like Google Earth of the human body. Doctors have to read many pages of records. If they do it directly on a 3D figure, they save a lot of time that they can spend interacting with the patient," says André Elisseeff, director of the research division. IBM R&D in Zurich.
The system has recently been implemented for the first time in Europe at Aalborg Hospital, northern Denmark, a center with 150 beds and more than 10.700 patients treated.
Specialties related to bone and muscle injuries, such as rheumatology, could benefit the most from the system, since they handle long histories of recoveries and treatments that can be analyzed at a glance in 3D representations. "In a couple of months we will finish the pilot in Denmark and see if this type of innovation really matters to doctors. In the end, they decide."