Interesting article at ThinkBalm on some predictions for Immersive Software in 2010.It is a worthwhile read with some good insights. However, the article seems to focus in on the collaboration and meeting capabilities of such spaces. While this is a rational argument, due to the quick return on investment, and the ability to easily use the spaces for communication work, I can't help thinking that there needs to be more exploitation of the design and prototyping capabilities of such immersive environments.
The same modelling capabilities that give you rooms, avatars and other devices in world, can give you very powerful tools for actual prototyping of products, both at the artifact and service level. My research seeks to leverage such environments for process modelling, in order to aid the process of validating the "prototype processes" with clients, via as-is and to-be model visualisation. Again, the tools will have to approach high levels of maturity in order to be useful to analysts, and to give a good return on investment.
My prediction is that such collaborative environments will be more and more used for product development, by geographically distant teams. Maybe not this year, but I expect that the ability to remotely develop artifacts collaboratively, in addition to remote conferencing, will be very useful to companies wanting to cut down on travel expenses, and to effectively utilise distributed expertise in their businesses.
Ross
