Our Rocking The Metaverse multi-virtual world tour kicks off tomorrow.  Over the next few weeks we will tour - metaverse style - through Second Life, Metaplace, Twinity and the Reaction Grid.  I hope you can join us - somewhere!

The first tour stop is Tuesday May 19th on Orange Island at 1PM SL (PT).   The SLURL will take you directly there if you are already a Second Life resident.  http://slurl.com/secondlife/Orange%20Island/195/134/31

If you aren’t a Second Life resident, we’d love for you to join us.  Just take a few minutes to join at this site, and be sure to say hello when you get there!

Steve Prentice, Gartner research Fellow, talks about how enterprises can use utilize virtual worlds for real benefits in a tough economy.

“If the process, if the focus of attention is on the content, then in actual fact virtual worlds are not the best solution. One of the other virtual collaboration methods is a better way of doing things…perhaps web conferencing ..

But if you actually need to be able see what other people are doing and you need the persistence of leaving behind you in that space the things that you’ve created then what we think of today as a virtual world, is actually a worthwhile solution.

What we tend to find in enterprise usage is people start to find in the early days that the avatar becomes a distraction, and you have to just sort of to get over that. There is a learning curve involved.  But virtual worlds for enterprises are a tool, they’re means for collaborating mroe effectively. They allow you to have persisnenc and they allow you to interact with the space around you and with other people.

So if the context of what you are doing and what you are interacting with is important, then a virtual wolrds works well.  If it’s the content is important the actual document itself, the presentation you’r working on then virtual worlds are overkill, the avatar simply gets in the way.”

Compelling open source virtual world. More here.

I tried to get into the Mycosm Beta this morning, but was met with a nasty error upon submitting my request:

com.cyscape.browserhawk.LE: Error 1271: Evaluation has expired. To purchase BrowserHawk4J call cyScape at 1-800-932-6869 or 1-301-424-8200 or visit http://www.cyscape.com/order

Just when you thought e-anything was so yesterday, Lenovo unveiled eLounge powered by Nortel’s new virtual world platform, web.alive aka “project chainsaw” at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas at the Venetian Hotel’s AquaKnox.

According to Lenovo’s welcome pane eLounge allows you to (emphasis mine):

Experience a truly virtual 3D on-line shopping experience. Ask your friends to join you, and together explore and learn about lenovo products. It is similar to shopping in a retail store except you are on-line and in control of your real time interactive shopping experience.

* Create your own personal avatar
* Browse and interact with our virtual products
* Walk around and share your experience with customers from around the globe
* Get support from one of our virtual avatar product specialists

Just when you wanted to be in control of yourreal time shoping experience, now the power of Nortel makes that possible.