Smart Meeting Rooms, a concept for Second Life

Here’s what I’m working on 

and I'm looking for collaborators!  

 
“Smart meeting rooms” in Second Life


Here's the concept:
* Current teams and meetings in RL are often not very productive

        Either mind-numbing or hostile

* In almost all cases,   remote meetings via Zoom, etc. are worse. Every day there's a new article in the news about how "remote meetings" are a massive drain on our energy.   The major reason is that they are not designed to manage the "emotion channel",  the non-verbal clues and cues we send each other constantly in Real Life interactions and meetings -- all those little grunts, twitches, shifts of body positions, tension in the face, etc. add up -- a lot!





* Linden Labs Virtual World Second Life has affordances that RL doesn’t, and that many-faced "remote conferencing" system such as Zoom or GoToMeeting or Skype lack, so possibly the whole “meeting” User Experience ( UX ) could be crafted to boost the odds of having a great meeting. 


 How could that be done?


Answer:  tilt the emotional playing field! 

 

 What can be "tilted"?  In a virtual world essentially everything can be changed, from the "room" if there is even a room,  to the avatars.  It can be changed in real-time, and potentially managed as effectively with a control panel as the lighting is for a stage play, or the audio in a recording studio.

Why meet in "rooms" anyway?   Would comfortable chairs around a fire-pit make for a better conversation?


  Every aspect of a meeting space in Second Life could in principle be controlled dynamically by a wise facilitator using a sophisticated dashboard and controls:    seating arrangement, environment ( ambient or response-sounds, lighting, spot-lighting, weather, size of room,  walls, fog , table shape/size, jungle?, city?, mountain vista? )



*  Since permissions can be given to a Second Life “Experience”, every aspect of avatars themselves could be dynamically controlled:   age, sex, size, muscles, clothing, species,  ambient and responsive-gestures.

*  In practice humans are exquisitely aware on an unconscious level of  subtle changes in other humans’ expressions, body language, or echoing behavior, etc.  As the book Nudge points out, the clues we respond to may all be both gentle-touches and not even consciously noticed to have a measurable impact on behavior.  Participants may not even realize their emotions are being manipulated.

* Someday a human DJ emotional-channel facilitator could be replaced with an AI expert system, relieving the chance that the additional person was a security risk or had an agenda that favored one “side” or another, and lowering the cost and thereby increasing availability of such “smart meeting rooms” to the public.

* side benefit - the changes in concepts, self-image,behaviors, and relationships created in SL may in fact persist once logged out into RL, so a great UX in SL could have downstream benefits as well that compound over time.

You can read more of my ponderings on what's wrong with meeting rooms and why, in my mind, that is potentially the most important question of the decade in terms of addressing how to make better decisions come out of the same groups of people, in a billion small ways, every day, as we actually learn how to work together and put our heads together and solve problems together.

Click to read; We need Serious R&D On How to Improve Meetings

The Baha'i concepts of "consultation" are quite relevant to how meetings should happen and this technology in my mind is only a way, using socio-psycho-biofeedback,  to have groups get there in a week, not 20 years, the same way biofeedback can help a person locate their alpha-rhythm in 15 minutes instead of 20 years in a cave in Tibet.     The end goal is that the people, once they grok and latch onto the idea, can carry on without the training wheels of technology

It can be compounded, so that those who grok the concept can act as guides to bring new people on-board, and if it can be done in virtual reality,  then distance is no barrier and the entire globe can tap into this way to vastly improve the outcomes of their own organic processes of decision-making.