Virtual Worlds: the next-generation of web 2.0

Imagine being a soldier in Saudi Arabia who steps into a holographic tent for the training he needs to pass the sergeant's exam.

Or an emergency manager in a rural Oregon county who goes to a telepresence room where her avatar meets with the avatar of the state emergency management director to negotiate for badly needed relief supplies after a flood.

That's the promise of "virtual worlds", a term which describes such popular web destinations as Second Life and sites where users can meet and interact in graphical environments that exist only in a computer.

Today, some of the best minds in government, private industry, and science are wrapping up the 2-day, 2nd annual Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds conference. The meeting is being held in the analog space of the National Defense University, at historic Fort McNair in southwest D.C., but there are also virtual participants online watching through webcasts, and in a number of virtual communities, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.

"The consortium is mostly 3/4ths government, academics, and private industry getting together to try to solve some of the collaboration problems of government," explains Doctor Paulette Robinson, Assistant Dean with the Information Resources Management College at the National Defense University (NDU).

"Virtual worlds is 3-D presence, you get to know somebody, trust somebody, in this space, so you have some very good applications, and the only problem is that 90% of the government can't get in from their desktops."

Robinson goes on to say that currently, the biggest barrier to entry for feds to use virtual worlds stems from concerns over security. Most popular virtual world applications such as Second Life require ranges of key ports on a network, and a desktop PC to be "open" to the internet to function, and that constitutes a cybersecurity threat for most federal chief information officers.

She says that the consortium is spearheading a project to develop virtual world applications that allow secure access across the government.

The potential upside of virtual worlds is significant. The federal government could save millions of dollars, over time, by implementing virtual worlds for meetings. Users could share documents and data in real-time while meeting in a virtual conference room where an attendee's body language can be read and factored into whether to accept that information. In addition, virtual worlds could enhance the delivery of citizen services.

In the case of NDU, Robinson says that while her school currently offers some of its training in online distance learning, virtual worlds offers the possibility of teaching in an enhanced mode with simulations and modeling.

Robinson says that even now the Pentagon is experimenting with a Second Life environment that would give the families of uniformed military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan a means of interacting with their loved ones during their deployment.

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On the Web:

National Defense University - The Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds

National Defense University - Information Resources Management College

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