I just read an interesting article about an IBM project to develop “3D virtual worlds to support distributed work”. They call the project Bluegrass. According to the article, “With Bluegrass, IBM is attempting to bring the visual, collaborative nature of virtual worlds to software development”. Software development?
If there was ever a task that was already a perfect fit for the digital domain it would be programing, right? Isn’t the point of a virtual reality to take something analog and create a digital or virtual counterpart? Code for software and bug reports are already digital and 2D by nature so why share it in a virtual 3D environment? Are they going to build virtual cubes, with virtual desktop computers with virtual screens, that have virtual code? I would be interested to see the prototype.
In the article, Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM cites “the Second Life 3D online environment as offering the kind of functionality IBM wants to bring to ALM with Bluegrass”. Interesting to me that IBM appears to be dissing virtual environments and avatars in their recent commercials but the vice president of marketing and development is citing Second Life as the model for their own 3D online environment.