Its not easy to pull off a live session with over 6 avatars (logging in from all over the world) acting out roles in a virtual world in front of a sceptical bunch of serious trainers. But Ron Edwards of Ambient Performance did just that last week at the London Learningtechnologies conference. Using Olive, a virtual platform that is managed by Forterra, he demonstrated how new hires in a retail company use a 3D Virtual World to get onboarded. I really liked the linkage of voice to expressions. Normally, in such an environment, there are limited or no facial reactions, here they smiled, laughed, and even looked liked the real people. See the photo of Ron Edwards attached and his lookalike avatar. Olive uses Voice Over IP (VOIP) so the participants were able to talk during the whole demo, showing how a new hire meets existing employees, and allowing them to ask questions and move around the virtual shop. It got pretty extreme during the role playing, also for the new hire, when they showed how a disruptive customer could make life hell for the shop assistant. We were told this role play scene could even be played back (just like video) to show what could be fixed by treating the customer differently. Impressive.
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