Virtual worlds set for second coming

New front-ends, please
Before businesses ramp up their involvement in virtual worlds, though, improvements in the worlds themselves are needed.

In particular, poor front-end interfaces and difficult sign-up processes hold back adoption for business users as well as the general public.

Gartner analyst Steve Prentice described the current user interfaces as "bad to worse".

FFW's Naylor agrees that user interfaces need to be improved as they don't currently meet the expectations users have of them - causing people to quickly lose interest.

IBM's Smart predicts more web browser-based virtual worlds will appear over time, meaning users won't have to spend time downloading and setting up client applications.

Other factors holding back virtual worlds include limited bandwidth and processing power on users' computers. Not enough of either can make accessing a virtual world slow and laborious. The spread of fibre and the continual arrival of faster computers could soon solve these kinds of issues.

Just like the web
Despite these challenges, experts agree virtual worlds have a big future for business collaboration and as a new channel for conducting business.

The teething problems they're experiencing are not unlike those faced by the web back in the 1990s.

FFW's Naylor points out that like the web, businesses initially jumped into virtual worlds before working out what to do with them - and attracted criticism as a result.

Naylor added, though, that many of the companies that persevered with the web ultimately found success. Virtual worlds could follow the same pattern. "It's not going to be an overnight sensation," he said.

Gartner's Prentice said businesses are sceptical about virtual worlds in the same way they were about the web when it first started to attract mainstream attention nearly 20 years ago.

But he believes their true potential remains untapped. "They may become potentially as significant as the world wide web was," he said.