Why Should I Care about Immersive Technologies for Engagement?

If you aren’t following Karl Kapp’s fantastic blog on virtual worlds for training and education, I highly recommend it. I’ve blogged here before about Karls’ work and mentioned his great book, Learning in 3D (co-authored with Tony O’Driscoll).

One of the questions I get frequently when I talk about how virtual worlds can be used for engagement work is, “Is Second Life just a fad?” In other words, is it around to stay? What kind of real impact is it going to have over the long haul?

My response is that it definitely is here to stay, and reports from organizations such as The Gartner Group and ThinkBalm show that immersive technologies are becoming a mainstream part of how organizations collaborate and learn together. Using these tools to engage with people is a natural extension of this practice, and they build on the exponential growth in social media that we’ve seen in engagement work over the past five years.

Check out this post from Karl Kapp’s blog that describes a couple alternatives that are blossoming outside of Second Life, as a way of showing how this technology is starting to change how we work together and with stakeholders.