Using Virtual Worlds

We identify six main ways in which individuals, businesses and organisations can use Virtual Worlds:

Socialising	Virtual worlds are primarily about social interaction. A lot of people are using the worlds just to talk in. Unlike web chat the conversation can take place in a rich environment, a living room, an office, a pub, and you have peoples avatars to help imprint the conversation as a "real" event, and even to read the rudiments of body language.
Entertainment	Virtual worlds feature a lot of user created entertainment - games, musicians, artists, even actors and role-players. You can also stream video and audio into many worlds, enabling people from across the globe to enjoy a virtual concert. The big difference to streaming such events to the web is again that social interaction thing - you can talk and dance with other attendees. The event becomes more real, more alive.
eCommerce	Second Life residents currently spend over $1.5 million US dollars a day within the world. Much of what they buy are clothing, devices and buildings created by other inhabitants. But big brands such as Toyota, Adidas and Vodafone see it as agreat place to market and to try customers onto their website and into their showrooms and shops to buy real world product. There are also several cases of charities, not-for-profits and other Third Sector organisations successfully using Virtual Worlds for awareness and fund raising.
eBusiness	As well as supporting sales and marketing activities, virtual worlds can assist with many business processes as organisations like IBM, Save the Children and PA Consulting are discovering, including: Communicating messages, including virtual focus groups and market research Virtual meetings - and audio and virtual world conference can be far more "real" than a painful video conference or disembodied audio conference Data Visualisation - displaying data from fthe web or any real world source within a 3D environment - and being able to let people gather around (and in) the data to view and analyse it
eLearning	Virtual Worlds provide an ideal support environment for both distance and centralised learning. Leading US instituions like Harvard, and UK educational institutions ranging from the Universities of Edinburgh and Coventry to Bromley College are learning how to deliver courses and support students within virtual worlds.
Envisioning	Virtual Worlds are a part of our future. As such they provide they are a great place to try out fuuture ideas - from new products and technologies, to new social models. In a world such as Second Life we can create gadgets and devices that are some 20 or 30 years away in the real world. We can learn the lessons, find out what works and what doesn't, before committing masses of real world R&D.