Is Immersive Collaboration Software Ready for Prime Time?
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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 seems to have ripened the opportunity for more immersive forms of interaction.
Eight key business scenarios have emerged for immersive/virtual collaboration, and more than one-hundred vendors have begun to explicitly target those use cases. This advisory evaluates whether the enterprise immersive/virtual marketplace segment has achieved critical mass and adequate maturity, and it outlines common business and technical challenges encountered by early adopters.