Here’s that list from 03/19/08 from Mike Rhodin  of IBM Lotus that references 5 trends to embrace in the virtual workplace.

The press release is here: http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=834515&sourceType=1 

Here’s my own description of them:

1) “The Virtual Workplace will become the rule.”
Laptops and mobile devices will allow us to move beyond the “desk - typewriter - phone” model of the workplace. For many people of course this is already a way of life.  Social networking aspects of the virtual world will give the feeling of community.  The need for business travel will be reduced as virtual worlds and telepresence tools get better.

2) Real-time collaboration will become the norm. 
Email is too slow, and should be used (as it is in Second Life) as merely a cache of stored messages which arrived for you while you were asleep.  Again, already many young workers consider email too slow, having grown up on texting on phones.

3) “Beyond Phone Calls”. 
If you value productivity and time, the telephone is one of the least effective ways to communicate. Here IBM again mentions IM as being a tool for replacing many phone communications.  Now, of course the telephone is not going away, that’s not the point.  But there are huge benefits available in shifting select communications from phone to IM.

4) Interoperability desired.
IBM focuses on interoperability and open standards as inevitable as the space matures.  A lot of this just hasn’t been figured out yet and may not be, since platforms are generally competing business entities with different competencies. They are not necessarily interested in interoperability, whereas business just requires a coherent set of tools that does a few basic things flawlessly. That might not be found in any 1 platform, hence the cry for openness. They also mention increased ease of finding resources which could refer to ease of finding things in virtual worlds or better access to the correct individuals.

5) “Meetings” replaced with new models.
Fewer meetings - Woo-hoo!  It’s a conceptual leap - “gaming technologies will significantly influence online corporate meeting experiences”.  As I said at Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 in San Jose “gamers are using it now” and in fact, “collaborating ” much more effectively and with less cost.

-Bob Ketner

This official video from Cisco’s YouTube channel explains that the design of the system was centered on “human factors” and “the experience”. How much unspoken human communication can be transmitted through this real-time interface? Would people prefer to be “avatarized“? Like the video phone before it this may seem both useless and indistinguishable from magic. Either way, it illustrates further how “the Metaverse is not a simulation” but rather a newly created space that is experienced. Fascinating, Captain.

Industry Week online Computerworld and Business Standard online have some new articles about telepresence - remote real-time, life-size conferencing. Businesses offering such systems include Teliris and Codian, Polycom, and Cisco Systems.

Business Standard cites the average price of a telepresence system to be around USD$300,000. With a little math you can see that such a system would pay for itself in saved travel expenses within a very short period of time. Although the videophone has been available since the early 1960’s it never saw adoption specifically because the use of the voice telephone interface allowed freedom of movement, appearance, and multitasking that is simply not possible when looking at a small screen.

What’s different now? The wall sized screens and bandwidth allow for a completely new experience.

Notice how the participants in the video call it “unsettling” and “hard to get used to”. On the plus side - it makes everyone look like a news anchor! These systems are big, clunky and expensive now - how soon until telepresence is small, convenient, and cheap?