Bluegrass: Lessons for Deploying Virtual Worlds Within the Enterprise

This paper describes the challenges of deploying current, state-of-the-art virtual worlds within the typical enterprise. We start by describing Bluegrass, our prototype desktop virtual world embedded in a collaborative software development environment. Then we discuss some of the issues we encountered while trying to deploy Bluegrass to test its effectiveness in improving the distributed software development process. While some of the issues are specific to Bluegrass, we conclude that a number of the issues are common to any similar sort of virtual world. We call for the development of new virtual world technologies, lightweight and focusing more on people rather than places, to more effectively test their usefulness within the enterprise. Author

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