About a week ago Linden Labs announced the availability of a beta version of Second Life Enterprise, a product that had been rumoured for some time because people knew something was being developed under the code-name Nebraska. This has interesting implications for our work at Arcada.

Second Life Enterprise attempts to deal with a number of the main reasons cited by business for not leaping into Second Life. It runs inside a firewall on a company’s own servers, and does not connect to the main Second Life grid (no more dragons and flying penises; but it does allow items to be imported from the main grid. In addition, employees can use their own names, and select their avatar from “10 multicultural avatars—with both casual and formal business attire”, if they do not want to create their own.

According to the official FAQ,

Second Life Enterprise comes standard with a rich array of content to get you up and running within your virtual environment right away. This content includes: 7 pre-built regions including a large, 4-corner auditorium for larger gatherings, two conference centers for meetings and smaller events, a space station, and several sandbox regions. We also include several 3D productivity and brainstorming widgets and ten business avatars—five men and five women—representing a wide spectrum of cultural backgrounds—complete with mix-and-match clothing and accessories.

Even more interestingly, there is a new web-based administrative system that looks, from the few screenshots I have seen, to be not unlike the phpMyAdmin control panel. This enables bulk adding and editing of users, as well as a lot of regional controls – including the ability to move regions and load and unload them.

The price of all this starts at $55,000, and the mini-world will house up to 400 simultaneous inhabitants.

Where does this leave us?

The online media research team at Arcada are just about to begin a project that we have codenamed WaterCooler, because we had to think of a name for the grant application. The aim of this project is to explore the possibility of enacting what we are terming telepresence inside Second Life, or one of its clones: OpenSim and RealXtend.

Telepresence is, in our view, the opposite of immersion. In immersive worlds people enter to play a part in the world – whether this is as a player in a game or as a member of a virtual civilisation. In immersive worlds who you are in the real world does not matter. What matters is what and how you contribute to the virtual world. Telepresence is what happens when real people enter a virtual space to engage in real-world activities. In an immersive world the avatar is all anyone else ever knows. In telepresence the avatar is ideally an invisible, or gossamer thin, blur over the real you.

Second Life Enterprise would seem to be a way for Linden Labs to stake a claim on the possibly emerging business of enhanced telepresence. However, sensibly enough, they are looking for customers from large international corporations. Their list of fourteen alpha and closed beta users includes “IBM, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), New Media Consortium (NMC), Case Western Reserve, Intel, and Northrop Grumman”.

Our concern is with small and medium-sized businesses, and specifically with those in the Nordic region. What we are planning complements Second Life Enterprise perfectly. The fact that Linden Labs have begun this simply ratifies our decision to research in this are. Now that we know that we are not being silly in choosing this area to investigate next, we need to follow the story of Second Life Enterprise carefully, to see how it progresses and whether there is anything we can contribute.

This is especially true given the planned arrival of the Second Life Work Marketplace in the first quarter of 2010. This will “allow large organizations to download entire regions of collaboration tools, meeting and event solutions, training solutions, work avatars, business-oriented environments, and much more, into their stand alone Second Life Enterprise environment and make enterprise-wide use of that content under an organizational site license.” Initially the people who can offer goods in this marketplace will be limited. Later it will be opened up.

Finding out more

There are some very useful links at the end of Amanda Linden’s blog post called Introducing Second Life Enterprise, Now in Beta, and Second Life Work Marketplace, which will take you to the FAQ, and to detailed descriptions of various aspects of the planned product.

In addition, there is background information available at Information Week and V3.co.uk.