Journal of Virtual Worlds Research: Managerial and Commercial Applications of Virtual Worlds

CFP – Journal of Virtual Worlds Research: Managerial and Commercial Applications of Virtual Worlds

Motivation and Scope
The intriguing potential of virtual worlds has attracted a significant amount of scholarly work in the business research domain. As much as we recognize the invaluable contribution made by scholars in this area, we also see the need for more research that can offer visionary perspectives to shape the future design and use of virtual worlds. Through the business lens, virtual worlds are often perceived to be promising yet risky and exciting yet formidable for the use and management of individual and collaborative work. Scholars and practitioners are confronted with an apparent contradiction: on the one hand, the business case for virtual worlds appears to offer great promise; while on the other hand, the observed returns and demonstrable successes are often absent or negligible.

This special issue on “managerial and commercial applications” of virtual worlds aims to highlight research that makes a significant and novel contribution in theory and practice about virtual worlds in the business domain. We are seeking papers that showcase new directions for research by examining technical, behavioral, economic, and/or social perspectives of virtual worlds in organizational and business environments. In particular, we are interested in papers that enable us to better understand managerial and organizational issues associated with virtual worlds and how these environments should be designed, used, and managed for commercial and managerial purposes to enhance business value. We especially welcome innovative and creative research that enables our audience to see the new possibilities offered by the unique affordances of virtual environments.

Authors are invited to submit original scholarly manuscripts that will make significant contributions to the advancement of our understanding of managerial and commercial applications as it applies to virtual worlds. We encourage diverse methodological approaches and welcome both qualitative and quantitative research studies, as well as theoretical, conceptual, and empirical studies.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Novel and innovative design and development of managerial and commercial applications of virtual worlds
• The use, management, and evaluation of virtual worlds in organizational settings
• Individual and group behaviors in virtual worlds that are used for business purposes
• Process and governance of individual and collaborative group behaviors and mechanisms in virtual worlds
• The role of psychological and social attitudes and characteristics on behaviors, processes and outcomes in virtual worlds
• Ethics, privacy, security, and trust issues related to virtual worlds in the business domain
• Intra- and inter-organizational communication and collaboration and cultural issues in virtual worlds
• Business and economic models of virtual worlds
• Power and political issues related to individual, group, organizational, and societal behaviors in virtual worlds
• Commercial applications and commercialization of virtual worlds technologies and environments

Submission Instructions
Authors are invited to submit original scholarly papers of up to 6000 words including footnotes, references, and appendices. Interested authors should submit a two-page extended abstract by the deadline indicated below. All submissions (abstracts and papers) should be made via the JVWR publishing system (see www.jvwreserach.org > About JVWR > For Authors). All submissions will be blind reviewed. Accepted papers will be published online in the Volume 5, Number 3 (2012) of the Journal.

Timeline
Authors submit abstract: May 15, 2012
Editors return comments on abstracts: May 30, 2012
Authors submit full paper: July 1, 2012
Editors return review report and initial decision: September 1, 2012
Authors submit revised paper: October 1, 2012
Editors return final comments and decision: November 1, 2012
Authors submit final version: November 30, 2012
Publication: December 31, 2012

Guest Editors
Shu Schiller, Wright State University, shu.schiller<at>wright.edu
Brian Mennecke, Iowa State University, mennecke<at>iastate.edu
Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, fnahunlnotes<at>unl.edu

The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is an online, open access academic journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect with virtual worlds research. Virtual worlds ignite a continuously evolving area of study that spans multiple disciplines and the JVWR editorial team looks forward to engaging a wide range of creative and scholarly research.

AJET Special Issue: Virtual Worlds in Tertiary Education

We are pleased to inform you that the much-awaited Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET) special issue on Virtual Worlds in Tertiary Education, guest edited by Mark J. W. Lee (Charles Sturt University and University of New England), Barney Dalgarno (Charles Sturt University) and Helen Farley (University of Southern Queensland) has now been published. The guest editorial and all eight articles that constitute the special issue are freely available below and from the AJET website at http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet.

From "In search of a method to assess dispositional behaviours: The case of Otago Virtual Hospital" by Swee-Kin Loke, Phil Blyth and Judith Swan

/Robin

Supporting the Immersive Internet Industry: Implications for Nordic Policymakers

One of NVWN’s final project activities was to produce a policy report related to the virtual world / Immersive Internet industry in the Nordic Region for the project’s primary co-financier, Nordic Innovation.  The report’s primary author is NVWN member: Dominic Power, who is Professor of Economic Geography at Uppsala University. Dominic’s research is primarily on the cultural and creative industries with a special emphasis on Sweden and the Nordic region.

This report along with the NVWN project’s other deliverables to Nordic Innovation are available for download on NVWN’s website: http://nordicworlds.net/project-findings/.  Below is the Executive Summary from the report.

/Robin

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Examples of "Nordic" Firms in the Immersive Internet Industry

April 25 – David Burden on “Virtual Worlds: A Future History”

When: April 25, 15:00 to 16:00 CET / 6:00 to 7:00 am SLT
Where: VCEI in Second Life
Also livestreamed and recorded for viewing at a later date on NVWN’s livestream channel.

On April 25, NVWN would like to invite you to a presentation by David Burden titled: “Virtual Worlds: A Future History”. David’s slides can be found here:

About Daden Limited

Daden are specialists in creating immersive learning and visualisation environments. Daden enable our clients to use innovative new technologies to deliver real business benefit, whether that is through creating more efficient and effective training, examining large sets of structured or unstructured data in order to make better decisions, or creating engaging virtual personalities who can provide enhanced and personalised customer service 24/7.

Our clients come from both the public and private sector, and from the UK and abroad. In the public sector we have worked with Government Departments and Agencies, with City and Local Councils, with educators from Universities to Schools, and with health and care providers. In the private sector our clients have ranged from housing associations and marketing companies to major financial services providers and car manufactures.

Daden is about helping businesses take a fresh approach to traditional challenges through using some of the most advanced and engaging technology around today.

About David Burden

David started his career in army communications before being “demobbed” in 1990. During the Dot Com boom David founded a mobile data company and set up the Midlands chapter of the First Tuesday networking organisation. David has been involved in artificial intelligence and virtual worlds since the mid 1990s. He has been in Second Life since 2004 and has also had homes in There.com and Alpha World. David founded Daden in 2004 to help organisations exploit the social, educational and commercial potential of virtual worlds. David has also written a number of successful science-fiction role-playing game books.

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No registration is necessary. We hope to see you there!

/Robin

Innovation and Market Creation in and around Virtual Worlds

Future of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Virtual Worlds

One of NVWN’s project activities was to produce a report on the future of innovation and entrepreneurship in virtual worlds and the 3D internet for the co-financier, Nordic Innovation. The report’s primary author is NVWN member: Eilif Trondsen, who is the Director of Learning, Innovation and Virtual Technologies at Strategic Business Insights in Silicon Valley.

This report is available for download on NVWN’s website: http://nordicworlds.net/project-findings/.  Below is the Executive Summary from the report.

/Robin

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Future of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Virtual Worlds
Executive Summary

The purpose of this report is to provide a strong and reality-based understanding of the future of innovation and entrepreneurship in Virtual Worlds (VWs) since the NVWN team thought it was important to put the future in the context of what we have seen and experienced over the last 10-20 years during which time we saw VWs and related technologies gain the attention of the general public (e.g., beyond the confines of technologists and futurists).

This report starts with examining the promise that many users and analysts of VWs have seen for VWs, not only in providing interesting and fun places for children’s entertainment (which still dominate VWs as an industry) but also for more serious applications that both large and small businesses have seen as potentially interesting and valuable. The first section reviews a range of applications and notes how many large companies, including IBM and BP, for instance, have used VWs for a range of activities of which thousands of their employees have taken advantage, by accessing virtual environments from many different parts of the world. We also note that learning and training applications have been among the most popular, and this seems to continue, as students, academics and corporate training personnel are now experimenting with the use of open source VWs for such applications.

After the discussion of the promise offered by VWs, the report’s second section reviews the evolution of VWs to give readers a time-line perspective of major developments of VWs and what some of the major phases have been in the evolution of VWs. This section also takes an objective and critical look at why VWs have not achieved the rapid growth and mass adoption that many analysts predicted in the mid- 2000s. Some of the excessive enthusiasm and lack of critical assessments in this period was perhaps inevitable as part of the “hype curve” that most emerging 1 NVWN Milestone 16 technologies experience. VW enthusiasts were not as encumbered by the challenges that many “newbies” faced when trying Second Life for the first time, for instance. The section identifies and discusses some of the major obstacles that have held back VW adoption by users who have embraced the Web by the billions (and the very rapid growth in users by Facebook and even more so by Zynga illustrate what user-friendly technology combined with strong user utility can bring in a very short time period).

At the core or heart of any VW experience lies the technical VW platform and its functionality, including the affordances of the platforms (which determine what users can and cannot do and how easy or difficult it is to accomplish various tasks). Section three of the report therefore reviews and describes a number of major proprietary as well as open source platforms. The discussion also notes the positioning of the platforms in the marketplace and points out which of the platforms are no longer available, either because they have been acquired or failed to gain sufficient customer base. These market realities are not unique to the VW industry of course as companies taking emerging technologies to market fail more often than not. And given the size of the VW industry, in terms of revenues, analysts have expected market consolidation to take place.

Finally, section four peers into the future through the use of scenarios that provide four “alternative futures” (rather than future predictions), each of which is structurally different because of the combination of driving forces that shape each particular scenario. At the NVWN workshop in Reykjavik, Iceland in the summer of 2011 the NVWN team agreed that technology (closed versus open) and economy (closed versus open) should be the two “axes of uncertainty” behind our scenarios, and the report section presents a scenario narrative for each of the four scenarios, including what the implications are for innovators and entrepreneurs of the particular scenario.

CfP: Virtual Worlds Research Network conference (Edinburgh, UK)

The Virtual Worlds Research Network (VWRN) will launch with an inaugural conference May 16-18th, 2012, in Edinburgh, UK.

Abstract DL: 22 April 2012

For further information on the conference, please visit http://www.vwrn.org/

New Book: Engaging the Avatar

Engaging the Avatar: New Frontiers in Immersive Education

Editors:
Randy Hinrichs, 2b3d
Charles Wankel, St. John’s University, New York

* More information at http://infoagepub.com/products/Engaging-the-Avatar
* Paperback 978-1-61735-751-0
* Hardcover 978-1-61735-752-7
* eBookISBN: 978-1-61735-753-4

Engage your students with something bright, fresh, and never static. Do you want to understand the future of education? Are you feeling slightly baffled and challenged by emerging educational technologies? Unsure how to engage your students in an educational virtual world? This book will answer those questions and can get you started on this approach to student-centered learning. You will learn how to engage today’s technology savvy students, having the new avatars perform from the first day of class.  Learning by doing is liberating.  In virtual worlds freedom from limits might be having your team meet as microorganisms or on while flying Mars and Jupiter through an asteroid belt.  Students will be prepared for immersive interfaces of the future through virtual world learning platforms now. This starts with engaging your avatar and is completed in a transformation in how you interact with the internet. Whether using the visual internet to learn or to interact with a customer about a product or service, this immersive interface can be a world that knows you and forms around your unique needs and interests.

Open Innovation Session Planning

Robin Teigland, Titiana Moldovan and Steve Mahaley met today to brainstorm ideas related to open innovation for businesses, how to source examples, and how to bring those examples to life for an audience of 50-60 business leaders – in Brazil!!

Steve will be leading a session in October there during a conference on Open Innovation. We are seeking practical ideas to illustrate / demonstrate for the attendees; what companies are using open innovation techniques, what techniques they use (e.g. crowd sourcing, crowd funding, etc.) and what new value is created from those approaches.

Today we explored the opportunity of demonstrating new technologies *during* the event itself, using Second Life or Open Sim to have guests from other parts of the world present how they are using new technologies and open innovation techniques.

Question for the readership! Does anyone have experience in designing an object in SL or Open Sim and then printing that with a 3D printer?

Stay tuned – we will have another update later in April…

Video on Cross-media Storytelling

The video Cross-media Storytelling explores cross-media in multimedia and film production practices and how such practices cross genre conventions and media platforms (such as film, virtual worlds, interactive games, video, online social media, and printed and ebooks). The video shows highlights of a half-day seminar held at Roskilde University, Denmark in December 2011 as part of the NVWN project and its activities within entrepreneurship.

The seminar focused on one case, the full-length feature film, My Avatar and Me (2010), written and co-directed by Danish Bente Milton (Milton Media ApS) and Mikkel Stolt (Fenris Film and Multimedia Productions ApS).

The video has three parts. 1) The first part is a presentation by Lisbeth Frølunde on the practical and theoretical perspectives related to the phenomenon of cross-media (click here for prezi). My Avatar and Me is seen as utilizing the documentary genre for a partially fictionalized story about experiences in SL and explores ideas of presence, relations, emotions, and even, reality. Excerpts from the film trailer are shown. 2) The second part is an interview with the two film co-directors of My Avatar and Me: Bente Milton and Mikkel Stolt. 3) The third part is a panel discussion held at both a physical location at Roskilde and in the virtual world of Second Life. The panel was simulcast, i.e., simultaneously a physical event that was broadcast, in this case, in Second Life and live streamed on the NVWN blog.  A panel of researchers and Bente Milton and Mikkel Stolt were in Roskilde. In the VCEI of the NVWN area of Second Life were avatars, including Mikkel Stolt, the British photographer Rob Gould, and Helena – an SL personality, all of whom were avatar performers in My Avatar and Me.

Thanks to video collaborators and staff at Experience Lab, Roskilde University, and to Robin Teigland of SSE and NVWN for organizing the SL avatar panel.

/Lisbeth