Stale doughnuts and doodling on notepaper can't compete with giant squirrels and hesitant text-speak, if a new study by Penn State University on the effectiveness of group work can be believed.
Researchers found that groups worked together better in online world Second Life than in face-to-face meetings and teleconferences.
Psychology student Nathan McNeese created an experiment in which teams were asked to solve a complex problem, using different meeting styles: 10 teams worked face-to-face, 10 teams worked through teleconferencing, and 12 teams worked as groups of avatars in Second Life.
Facing the truth
The face-to-face teams felt most confident of their performance, yet the Second Life teams provided the most accurate answers in the task.
"Overall, Second Life is a viable option for group work," McNeese said. "But there's definitely a learning curve with it and accomplishing even basic tasks can be difficult, especially if you've never used it before."
What do TechRadar readers think? Can Second Life interactions replace real meetings? And if so, who makes the tea?
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adityazutshi
October 5th 2008
1. With the existing state of technology, the Second Life interactions can replace real meetings and collaboration to some extent. Apart from all the obvious benefits like saving on cost and time, there is another very important advantage. The small amount of unrealism in the virtual environment, to some extent, takes away the self proclaiming attitude among people, who tend to become more focussed towards the task at hand rather than focussed on themselves. People tend to help out each other get accustomed to the new environment, thereby improving team dynamics which reflects at the end.
But then SL needs to incorporate collaboration oriented features like document editing, in-world browser which are very important for business collaboration.
There is a very important component of non-verbal communication during meetings which right now is missing in SL. Even the most primitive of gestures have to be initiated using a keyboard/mouse. There should be a provision of capturing gestures through some kind of sensors which would make the experience of having meetings more realistic.
-Aditya Zutshi is researching on Virtual Environments and can be contacted at adizutshi@gmail.com
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