Virtual Worlds Forum

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Quick Thought: can businesses track their employees within virtual worlds?

Comments [1] | 25 October 2007

This is something that's just come to me in the coffee break at the conference, just too late to ask anyone on the corporate-focused panels about it. But it's worth posting here, to see what kind of feedback it gets. Here's my question: an increasing number of big corporate companies are using virtual worlds like Second Life for work-related purposes - collaboration, meetings, training and so on. So, they're kitting their employees out with Second Life accounts, and releasing them into the world to do Good Things and deliver a Significant Return On Investment. And stuff. But are they then tracking them? By which I mean monitoring where those employees go within the world, and whether they're straying outside the areas where the company would like them to go - for example, spending an hour a day wandering around the dodgy red-light districts, rather than working virtually with colleagues. In other words, is there a Second Life equivalent of the kind of technology that corporates use to monitor the websites that their staff visit in company time? Can the IT guy pull up a map of exactly where an individual employee has been, and then identify whether that's work-related or not? Is there a demand from corporates for this sort of thing, or are they more relaxed? If anyone has any thoughts, do post a comment.

Comments [1]

1 comments

25.10.07 at 16:10

Well there are numerous tracking solutions in Second Life.  I know we built our own for the Schome project so we could see where and when people were spending time on our island.

I wouldn’t like to say how easy it would be monitor an individual as they wander over many sims, although I suspect their is a way of doing it from Linden Labs end.

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