Business value of 3d virtual environments
Ludwin Fuchs, Steven E. Poltrock, Richard A. Wojcik · ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin · 1998
As a large geographically distributed company, Boeing needs integrated technologies that support, even encourage, working together across distances. As a foundation for working together, employees need to become acquainted with one another, form communities around shared interests, develop relationships, build trust, and communicate. Social networks are important within Boeing; people use these networks to find and fill openings in projects and programs. Project teams will more readily span geographic distances when social networks span distances.At Boeing Applied Research & Technology (AR&T) we have been investigating 3D virtual environments as support for geographically distributed teams, including support for social interactions. In this paper we outline potential business applications within large companies such as Boeing, and we describe our experiences with Boeing World, a corporate 3D environment based on the Active Worlds systems from Circle of Fire, Inc. (see http://www.activeworlds.com).