By placing the servers behind a firewall, attendees could be reasonably certain that anyone they encountered was an IBM employee, meeting the minimum requirements for confidential exchange. However, the exact identity of the individual remained in question. The registration system for Second Life at the time forced users to select a “last name” from a predefined set of names. In addition, the system provided no facility for displaying “real names,” insuring that everyone attending the event did so under a pseudonym.

In addition, while the interconnection between the public Second Life “grid” and the conference space provided an extremely powerful way of maintaining social ties before and after the conference, it created another identity-related problem: a high level of avatar customizability. Customizability allows a user to create (painstakingly) a replica of their real-life body, facilitating the type of easy recognizance that makes face-to-face meetings ideal. However this same customizability enables users to create bodies that not only do not resemble their real-life self, but might not even resemble their genders or even species. If trust is key to business and one uses personal recognition as a first-order of trust, this lack of easy identification presents a severe obstacle.

In 2008, emphasis was placed on the community aspect of the space. A total of 16 “simulators”, or 256 virtual square acres of space, were allocated (Figure 2). Most of the 3D modeling and building was done on a volunteer basis, with members of the IBM community donating their time, if not always their expertise, to create the campus for the conference. While at least one professional designer (the author) was part of the process, a good deal of the work was done ad-hoc. While this had the benefit of creating group ownership and a sense of pride among a subset of the participants, it also created an experience that was fractured, aesthetically inconsistent, and difficult to navigate. Furthermore, while the server count was deemed necessary to support the number of concurrent users, the physical space was massive and inherently hard to travel.

Further compounding the navigation problem, limitations of the hardware used to access the event as well as the inherent difficulty of avatar navigation in 3D space ensured that users (novices in particular) found the experience annoying at best and fiendishly difficult to impossible at worst. Navigation for the first year was mostly a matter of users cutting and pasting “teleport links” to conference events-attending the virtual meetings sporadically and logging off immediately afterward, in much the same way they would have “attended” a virtual meeting using a browser-based chat and slide presentation tool. Very few users explored the space or made use of the many themed public areas that were provided. This navigation issue emerged during the event and was addressed the following year.

Assuming that participants managed to find their way around the conference and successfully identify the people they wanted to speak with, there was always the question of conversation scope. By default, conversation (typewritten and spoken “voice chat”) is scoped globally with a general notion of “falloff.” Thus avatars within a 20 meter radius of your avatar will, by default, hear every word of your conversation, and avatars past this point will hear nothing (various techniques were used to overcome this limitation for large events, such as keynotes, but this is the default behavior for regular conversation).

In practice this works much the same way that the real world works: One must make an effort to find a quiet space, close the office door or move to another to avoid being overheard or simply to avoid the noise of a crowd. In virtual spaces, however, the ability to monitor and trust that a channel is “secure” is a much more difficult proposition. At the same time, there is much research that suggests that the “hallway effect” of conferences is the primary utility of face to face meetings. While keynotes and organized events are useful, catching up with colleagues is even more so.

To be fair the Second Life platform does allow “person to person” calls and private chats, but the user interface is overly complicated. At this event many users resorted to traditional phone calls or, worse, avoided this kind of interaction entirely, treating the virtual environment as a very expensive and awkward slide-sharing tool for one-way presentations.

Drawing on the lesson learned from the previous year, the conference organizers decided that early and close design intervention was requisite to the success of the 2009 meeting. The space was built completely from scratch using the lessons learned from the previous year. In addition, the physical space was greatly reduced, from 16 servers to 8.

A radically simplified, linear organization structure was adopted around the notion of a “water world” (Figure 5) dotted with islands reserved for particular purposes. While visually appealing, this was primarily a functional decision: water has a tendency to be viewed by end users as “white space”, which allows “islands” a chance at being visually coherent, forming clear boundaries. The island organization scheme also works on a map level, allowing the user to create a simplified mental map of the conference space. This is reinforced by assigning a particular activity to each physical location, activating spatial memory to ease navigation.

The design also supported redundant methods of movement: Users were provided with teleportation hubs (Figure 6), maps, strong visual indicators on the ground (in case they opted to fly), and transportation mechanisms analogous to the real world (i.e., a working monorail with a companion walkway was implemented, allowing attendees to “ride” between sessions”).

Other basic design techniques such as a consistent signage and naming scheme with color-coding (Figure 6) were implemented to ease the difficulty in locating events. It was recommended that this design treatment be carried over to the website and the printed materials used for the conference as well, but this was not implemented in any significant way.

IBM, like many large corporations, is a distributed organization. Telephone interactions are a familiar and comfortable model, and many of the conference attendees wanted to take advantage of the “voice chat” capabilities of the virtual environment.

The scoping problem, outlined above, meant that it was often difficult for attendees to know to whom they were speaking, and even harder to know who might be listening.

In an effort to facilitate more “hallway” interactions as well as support more informal conversations among attendees, careful attention was paid to the layout of the voice chat areas, in particular with respect to the design of the “poster hall,” deemed one of the most successful areas used in the 2009 conference (Figure 7).

Echoing the linear design principle for the conference itself, the poster hall consists of two wings connected by a central agora. Each wing contains 40 poster presentation areas tiered in stacked rows of 20, for a total of 80 presentation spaces.

The SL platform allowed for multiple independent audio channels to be created, in “squares” of 1 meter minimum. Working with this, the audio space was isolated in such a way that each poster area comprised its own “channel.” This fact was visually reinforced by designing the poster presentation areas as “bays.” The baked-texture “light pool” on the ground indicates the chat area, and the “sidewalk” indicates a transition zone. Moving sideways between zones requires that the avatar either “climb over” a wall or transition into the contiguous hallway that connects the bays.

In practice the interaction is natural: Users are able to stand together, scoping their voice conversations with the poster in question and then move fairly freely into the “hallway” to continue a more public conversation. Empty poster bays are available for private chats, allowing users to initiate more interpersonal conversations without worrying who they were talking over or who might overhear.