Earlier this year, Tekes (Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation) invited us to present our project at a yearly seminar of their Tila (Spaces and Places) Programme. As can be derived from the name, this programme specialises in funding projects which concentrate on research done about our surroundings – work environments, social and virtual spaces etc. We were invited to present at the virtual spaces workshop.

The day included a seminar portion, project presentations and a special workshop section. In this post I’ll shortly cover what I was able to get from the day.

The seminar included three short presentations representing different interests. The two first were mainly aimed corporate participants (based on what I gathered from their discourse) and presented new concepts in air conditioning and office spaces. The third one, by Mikko Leisti from Pluto Finland, was by far the most interesting one. His presentation was about a whole new function for the central library, which is planned to be built at Helsinki downtown. What I liked was their focus on the people as the users of the space. In a way, they were planning on what libraries can enable rather than what they should do as such. You can read more of the concept from the report here (in Finnish).

After the shared seminar the participants were split off into three groups according to their interests. We headed off to the virtual spaces workshop where we saw a demo of Teleplace (former Qwaq). As often happens, the connection to the USA started fine, but was cut off before the demo could be finished. It’s a shame, since the demo was actually pretty good. The people at Teleplace have customised parts of virtual environments to suit specific corporate needs (such as ideation meetings) and given the instructor easy-to-use tools for guiding new participators in the space. After the demo we saw two presentations about EduFinland and Nokia’s plans about virtual reality, which I will not explain in detail.

The workshop session was interesting. Being a VR sceptic, the presentations so far had given me a bit of an insight into the possibilities and problems of applying immersive environments in practical work. In the workshop, we were instructed to think about what needs to be done in order to make these kinds of environments more attractive for organisations in Finland. Our group concentrated especially on the practical side of things. This is what we came up with:

1. The environments need to be connected to real work activities. Researchers need to go out there and find the processes that could be helped using such systems. This applies also when communicating to organisations. Use clear-cut cases of possible application, don’t just present the technology as such.
2. The technology needs to evolve and mature. Standards and API’s need to be developed so that environments can operate with each other and other programmes can be utilised within the VR context.
3. More well designed information needs to go out to organisations. What the companies are often looking for are clear descriptions of what they will get for their money. Return-of-Investment calculations should do this trick. Answer to the question: why? Also education and further demos could help (again: present real cases, not technology).
4. The last point was for me the most important one. I am not the only one who is just baffled at the sheer size and complexity of VR worlds such as Second Life. Awe is good in some ways, but not when it applies to getting new people to use software. Thus, the usability of the interfaces needs to improve significantly before we can imagine business excecutives using the systems. Also, the software is packed with features totally irrelevant to actual work. These also need to be cut down to make VR software easier to use. This could be done f.ex. by offering customisable packages so that only those features and environments, which are important to customers are included.

In general, I was positively surprised of the event. I gained a lot of new information about VR environments plus it’s always nice to meet new people researching the same field.

Edit (16.10.2009): The presentations and results of the workshop can be found here (in Finnish)