The initially meteoric rise of Second Life gave visibility to a (mostly) new crop of vendors looking to apply "immersive" or "virtual" experiences to enterprise collaboration. The idea here is that specialized applications can improve collaboration by making digital interaction a more human and life-like undertaking. Meanwhile, a growing emphasis on social computing services as part of enterprise collaboration efforts would seem to have ripened the opportunity for more immersive forms of interaction.

More than one-hundred vendors have begun to explicitly target at least eight key business use cases for immersive/virtual interaction. This advisory briefing we published yesterday evaluates whether the enterprise immersive/virtual marketplace segment has achieved critical mass and adequate maturity, and it explores common business and technical challenges encountered by early adopters.

Here's the table of contents for the advisory paper:

• Key Takeaways
• Introduction
• Typical Immersive Collaboration Scenarios
• The Marketplace at Large
• Major Vendors
• Example: VenueGen versus Teleplace
• Common Problems Customers Encounter
• Conclusion

This briefing is available to our Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software research subscribers.