Home as audio/video conferencing for work?
Ick. Are you serious?
I mean who the heck would even approve of this project? It seems that Ernest & Young, Microsoft, Merill Lynch, and others are participating in some study where they can do audio/video conferencing in an online world. As much as I am all for telecommuting, and much of a fanboy of Sony’s more than anything else…. SERIOUSLY?!?!?!
Give me a break. In the corporate world, Cisco rules in the audio/video world because you need some serious bandwidth and understanding of that. Outside of that, there’s nothing that Home brings to the table that hasn’t already been done via voip. Believe me, when I say that I’ve sat on enough conference calls with Netmeeting while telecommuting to know that Home just isn’t it. Period. If it was, Second Life would have already had this sucker made when they released audio support.
Truthfully, these virtual worlds are just that. Virtual. It doesn’t help anyone any to have access to shop around, or what not when you’re trying to have a meeting. It’s just not made for that and it’s not work conducive. But dream on academia. I suppose one day we might want this, but not on this console and not until you can beat out the good ole’ web + audio conferencing one-two combo.
December 31st, 2008 • 
Darius Sartre • 
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comment | January 2, 2009 at 01:51 | individual comment-link
I ask about the business case: Is it necessary to move around in a spatial environment, or is the Playstation 3’s natural ability to server up six-person video conferencing enough.
If the businesses were so interested in this at a truly functional level, we’d have many more initiative behind mobile worlds, except the variables are astounding in the mobile industry.
I encourage people to look at the PS3 as an un-desktop– a unified, consistent platform that can be deployed with identical hardware; acquired from any retailer; with a much longer shelf life than a PC counterpart. Zero-config if you will. PS3 has more out of the box to be functional and running in minutes, including the browser, connectivity and hard media capabilities that its competitors lack.
comment | January 5, 2009 at 16:05 | individual comment-link
I see some very niche business in virtual worlds coming from, you guessed it, mostly virtual world peeps. If some guy/gal really loves to do business in a virtual world then there’s a target market for somebody. Is it worth setting up shop in a virtual world to solicit a very narrow niche at this time? Maybe. I guess it depends on the business type.