MIT researcher Drew Harry flies his avatar into a house in Linden Labs’ online environment, Second Life. The avatar passes couches, a fireplace, and a dining-room table complete with red-velvet tablecloth and candles. “Second Life is relentlessly literal,” Harry says, pointing out one familiar domestic object after another.
Harry designs virtual spaces that don’t look like the familiar world–his virtual meeting room looks more like a football field than like a conference room. He says his goal is to stop mimicking the physical world and start creating a new kind of space. “It’s not clear to me yet that [virtual worlds] are actually useful,” Harry says. They will be useful, in his view, if they can take advantage of not being physical.
The long oval table common to a boardroom lets small groups of people see and hear one another while sitting comfortably. Since a virtual space doesn’t need to accomplish the same goals as a real space, Harry decided to ditch the table. Instead, his virtual meeting room arranges people based on their allegiance. Where an avatar stands signifies whether a person agrees or disagrees with the position being discussed. The meeting room’s other visual features are designed to track the complexities of shifting alliances and opinions throughout a conversation.
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