Use Avatars to Improve Virtual Meetings

Thank "Avatar" director James Cameron for giving us a compelling vision of the future. But thank IBM and many other companies for showing us how avatars can be great tools for conducting virtual meetings today.

Firm including Cisco, State Farm, and Wells Fargo use virtual worlds populated with avatars to brainstorm, train, sell and collaborate, according to an HBR.org post by Stanford prof Byron Reeves and Seriosity Chairman Leighton Read.

What do avatars bring to the workplace? The researchers say they are a cheap and green way to conduct business meetings. And allowing users to customize their online stand-ins provides for a bit of personality to flow through the wires.

But most of all, they're fun. Not only do we need more of that at work, but fun energizes discussions and makes them more productive.

"Our laboratory research shows that there is primitive engagement behind the fun -- the hearts of the people that control avatars beat faster, the areas of people's brains that regulate social interactions are more engaged, and people care substantially about how their avatars are treated -- even though all of the action is in a virtual world. As a result of this intensity, avatars create the emotional and social connections necessary for the most valuable business conversations -- those where innovations are first cooked up and debated, passions are exposed, and people win, lose, or accommodate via personal connections."

Remember the virtual meeting craze of a few years ago when Second Life was taking off? It quickly died down when the difficult reality of maintaining an online world hit home, and Sarah in marketing tired of spending all her Linden dollars wardrobing her Warrior Princess. But efforts like Avatar, I think, show how rich an online experience can become, and I expect Avatars and next-generation virtual meetings will become as common a business tool in this decade as Web-based meetings were last decade, especially as more of the gaming generation takes power.

Do you agree? How would you feel attending a virtual meeting as an avatar?

(Avatar image by World Economic Forum, CC 2.0)