The Role of the Personal in Social Workspaces: Reflections on Working in AlphaWorld

Abstract

Increasingly, many of us find our working life having to work not only in a main office, but also at home, at other institutions, from hotel rooms and so on. Such multiple sites, however, create problems in that all too often we find our documents and our colleagues unavailable at our current physical location. In a world where telecommuting is the norm, it seems plausible that a stable shared virtual office might be of benefit, creating a set of places that can be accessed to locate content and meet colleagues. This chapter will describe the issues that have arisen from three years of regular use of collaborative 3D virtual space built within AlphaWorld, a popular Internet-based shared 3D world. A small virtual “office” was constructed to try to understand the possibilities and the problems of this technology in actual use. It is these possibilities and concerns that will be discussed.