Acknowledging the power of Virtual Worlds, the US Agriculture Department has issued a request for offers to build a virtual world for collaboration, training, simulation, and analysis. In particular, I like this statement:
The virtual world’s features would need to be at least as good as or better than what’s offered publicly by Second Life or World of Warcraft, according to the statement of work for the project.
The pinnacle of openness and the pinnacle of graphics beauty in MMO’s, combined. They are looking for COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) solutions, so I suspect something like SecondLife Enterprise will be the victor. Proposals are due later this month, and contract is to be awarded later this year with three possible extension years.
via Feds look for their avatars in 3-D — Federal Computer Week.
AVAYA was one of the USDA Virtual World winners http://www.avayagov.com/webalive/
@James Corbett Read our feature on “Education in Second Life” for some examples. Basically anything that would be accomplished through flying people to some central location for classroom training can be accomplished in SecondLife. In addition, certain types of hands-on training could be replicated inworld as a combination Test & Experience.
Any idea what use virtual worlds will be put to in this context? I’m just finding it hard to imagine training scenarios.