Shiv on Learning

I have attended quite a few conferences and events this year and spoken at a few as well. Virtual worlds based events are much better in many ways. In the not too distant future I can see the majority of events taking place in virtual worlds.

The obvious reasons:

Convenience – you can attend them from anywhere. No need to waste time travelling. Importantly if the conference is not so good you can still take advantage of the speakers content and network but multi-task at the same time.

Accessibility - a lot more people can attend, not just those that can get to the location.

Cost – for all involved the costs, in both time and money, are a lot less.

The not-so-obvious reasons:

Better presentations
From a presenter’s perspective you can give a much better presentation in a virtual world. In the real world a presenter’s tool kit involves themselves and a data projector. There are only a limited amount you can do with these things. I was recently asked to give a presentation I had given in the real world in a virtual world. The presentation was transformed from one where I interacted with the audience in front of some slides to one where dragons appeared, pigs fell from the sky, giant iphones and facebook pages appeared to demonstrate what I was talking about. All these things make the presentation much more engaging and make it much easier to illustrate my point.

Greater interactivity during presentations
I encourage the audience to ask questions during my presentations. In a virtual world this can be done without disrupting the flow of the presentation. Usually, I will be talking using voice and people will be commenting and asking questions using text. This allows me to address their points at a suitable time without disrupting the flow of the presentation, it also allows other audience members to answer the question or add a comment without disrupting the presentation itself. The presentation becomes a much more interactive experience.vThis can’t be done in the real world. The tech community have been using online chat and micro -blogging services to discuss presentations for a couple of years now but the entire audience is not privy to the discussion, nor is the speaker.

In physical presentations people often feel too shy to ask questions and in virtual worlds the atmosphere is more conducive to question asking and answering.

It’s easier to give presentations

A real world presentation requires much more preparation. In a virtual world you can search though your inventory and pull things out without the audience noticing. This allows me to change the presentation on the fly to better suit the audience. I have added slides from previous presentations, pulled out objects and used them for activities, taken people to web pages and so on. The possibilities are endless.

If you were to rummage through the files on your computer to find the right video or slide during the presentation the audience would notice. Everything needs to be prepared beforehand and the kind of props you can use is very limited.

It is easier to network
Just right click on someone and add them to your friends list, send them a message, or open up their profile add them to another social network. You can have IM conversations with many people at once – something you cant do in real life.

I can see virtual worlds becoming the main venue for conferences, presentations and business events in the coming years. The challenge for organizers will be monetizing them. But if I where given a choice of attending a conference in a virtual world or one in central London (where I live), I would choses the virtual world.