Living, Learning, and Business in Second Life

Randy Hinrichs is CEO of 2b3d, a virtual world company with offices in Second Life. He stopped by today to demonstrate the locales that they’ve built to help clients conduct business and do work online on Second Life.

We were treated to a tour of their office. Features included board rooms, employee training facilities and medical training facilities. These spots are augmented with communicative and training tools. For example, the board room includes slideshows, blackboards, and other live conferencing tools.

Creating Conversation

Karrie Karahalios presented some of her investigations for how to create “Social Catalysts”.

Her work is motivated by an interest in developing technologies that “catalyze interactions”, that can get people to talk. Her approach is to (a) explore social cues that are transmitted, (b) sense those cues, (c) visualize social patterns, and (d) encorporate all of the above into the media space. By doing this, she seeks to provide more cue variety, feedback, message personalization, turntaking, conversation repair, etc…

Here are four of her projects: