Virtually Centralized, Globally Dispersed: A Sametime 3D Analysis

Globalization has been making many companies expand their offices outside their national borders in order to maintain a competitive market share worldwide. With this strategy comes the overhead of managing globally dispersed teams that must function as a unit. To achieve this result without the overwhelming costs of air travel, most companies resort to technology, web conferences, phone conferences, e-mails and video conferences. Recently, a new form of interaction was made viable with the use of virtual worlds, enabling avatar-mediated communication and collaborative work in an immersive environment [2]. IBM is one of the companies that invested in this form of technology for the purpose of virtual meetings, collaborative work and training, and developed a system called Sametime 3D which integrates their Sametime messenger to a virtual world. This paper describes Sametime 3D and analyzes its features in the context of mixed reality meetings.