Your Second Life Avatar Is Dressed Inappropriately

Business are slowly adapting to virtual worlds like SecondLife and ScienceSim as ways to hold collaborative virtual meetings and share information, especially as the economy makes air travel and meeting room rentals cost prohibitive.  But as these virtual spaces grow, it becomes an increasingly popular question as to what’s appropriate in these spaces that have traditionally thrived on the “anything goes” attitude.

“Companies need to have behavioral guidelines for the business use of an avatar if you’re representing the company,” he said. “Just like in real life, you have dress codes. This is kind of like an avatar dress code.”

That means no animal tails on your virtual self. “Engineers may think that’s kind of cool and show up at a meeting dressed that way,” Mr. Lundy said. “You would never want that person to represent you — or even be at an event.”

Most of these guidelines are relics of older businessmen entering the space and not being completely familiar with the environment or technology.  As the younger generation grows into the higher management positions, will these rules change?

via Your Second Life Avatar Is Dressed Inappropriately – Digits – WSJ.

Photo from Fabio Metitieri (Flickr: yukali)

About the Author: Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Graphics secondlife, virtual worlds