Author: John Cartan, Design Architect - Oracle Applications User Experience
Editor's note: The author attended Oracle OpenWorld at San Francisco's Moscone Center; the week of November 11, 2007. This is the second in a series of four reports from the show floor.
On the screen in Intel's Inside Innovation pavilion, I could see two of my fellow OpenWorld attendees watching a session from a comfortable-looking side room. One seemed human enough, but the other had large triangular ears and a bushy red tail. And the side room was not located on earth (or on any other planet), but in a shared virtual reality called Second Life.
Oracle Asia Research s Second Life Demonstration
Second Life is one of about eight popular virtual realities being studied by Oracle s Asia Research and Development Center. Second Life currently has about ten million active users, trades currency on major exchanges, and boasts a thriving virtual real estate market. Major corporations have offices there, Sweden maintains an embassy, and NPR s Science Friday takes calls from Second Life. Presidential candidates have even given speeches there.
Despite its popularity, I was initially skeptical that Second Life was ready for enterprise applications. But after chatting with the researchers, I began to see some interesting possibilities and interesting challenges.
I was already aware that virtual realities could play a role in customer relationship management, and that they could provide a richer form of Web conferencing. I also knew that there was already a lot of real money changing hands in Second Life, which implies a need for order-to-cash applications and so forth, but I assumed that those types of transactions would be done in the real world.
It turns out, though, that denizens of virtual realities prefer to conduct their business without ever leaving their imaginary world. Many transactions only make sense in the context of the virtual world, so new user interfaces (UIs) must be developed to facilitate those transactions.
Many of the controls we take for granted in a Web application did not yet exist in Second Life, so Oracle Asia had to invent them. They created dialog boxes and other controls using Linden Scripting Language (LSL) roughly equivalent to PHP. It was strange seeing virtual radio buttons based on desktop software radio buttons, which in turn were originally based on actual radio buttons.
Indeed, most of the affordances in Second Life resemble buttons and levers in the real world more than they do HTML buttons. For example, pushing a normal-looking elevator button in Second Life will cause a normal-looking elevator to descend and open its doors.
But in a virtual world much more is possible. In a web application, clicking a link or a button typically causes text or images to appear on a Web page. In Second Life, these interactions may cause the actual object being purchased to appear in the virtual room, or may teleport the user to another place. When coding such interactions, developers refer to locations and objects using an slurl (a Second Life URL ).
It s not yet clear where all of this is going or how soon it will become commonplace. But for UI designers who have grown tired of polishing well-established interfaces and who are looking for new territories to explore, the brave new world of virtual realities is wide open and ready for business.
