Researcher Designs Better Ways of Working Together when Apart

By Al Riske

22.January.09 - Nicole Yankelovich watches and learns.

"That's really the way I like to work," she says. "Let the problems emerge."

A 17-year Sun veteran, Yankelovich is currently principal investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project in Sun Labs.

Simply put, it's her job to find better ways for a widely dispersed workforce to work together.

Yankelovich became a practitioner in user experience research before the field was even designated as such, and through successive projects — Intermedia, Shared Shell, Awarenex, Sun Labs Meeting Suite, and now Project Wonderland -- Yankelovich has helped define the field.

Despite a number of naysayers, Yankelovich says she has no doubt that virtual worlds will become an indispensable business tool.

"This is the first time that I've felt ... the way I felt with the work I did with hypertext at Brown," she says.

That was in 1982, well before the advent of the World Wide Web, when she was doing research for the university -- funded, in part, by Sun.

"At that point, we were absolutely convinced that hypertext was going to be a primary way that people interacted, even though at the time there were a huge number of naysayers," she recalls. "It's hard to imagine now that anybody ever doubted that hypertext was a good idea."

Yankelovich says she has the same sense of conviction and excitement about 3-D virtual worlds today.

"I feel this is very much the same as the period of time we were in before the web with hypertext. There were a set of people who got it, and there were many people working on different approaches. And then suddenly there was an innovation that made hypertext mainstream," she says.

"I don't think we've gotten there yet with virtual worlds. But I'm convinced that we will. I'm 100 percent convinced that's going to happen. And Sun definitely has a good shot at being a major player in this arena."

Given the state of the economy worldwide, Yankelovich believes that technology — especially collaborative technology — has more appeal than ever before.

For example, many companies (Sun included) are restricting travel to save money.

"This is a time when you need less expensive ways to do the same things, and if we can create an environment with a much richer emotional bandwidth than a conference call, then I think we can eliminate a lot of the need for travel," she says.

That said, it was a challenge from David Douglas, who had recently become Sun's VP of eco-responsibility, that got Yankelovich and her team to focus on virtual worlds.

"He put out a challenge to the Sun engineering community, saying we need to reduce our real-estate footprint, so let's build our next building in the virtual world," she recalls.

"I was skeptical about the whole thing to begin with, but we started doing some experimentation in Second Life, which is where everybody starts," she recalls.

Yankelovich put Nigel Simpson, who happens to live and work on an island near Seattle, in charge of building an experimental space in Second Life, and she encouraged others to drop in and see how he was doing.

Bumping into coworkers in that virtual space marked the first time in seven years of working from home that Simpson had ever had a chance encounter with another Sun employee.

"That was a defining moment for us," Yankelovich says. "That's what lit the fire."

Around the same time, Yankelovich had been doing some consulting for Sun's Workplace Environments group, which gathers survey data about the distributed workforce.

"Both employees and their managers report that work-from-home employees are more productive, but when you drill down, they're more productive on individual work. Where they're suffering is on group work," she says.

"The lack of serendipitous encounters, the inability to have hallway conversations, and being forgotten about on conference calls can make work-from-home employees feel a bit disenfranchised."

So Yankelovich did a little fact finding of her own.

"Brainstorming was a huge issue that came up in my study. Teams that were largely distributed were not doing brainstorming, because there were inadequate tools. If you've ever tried to do brainstorming over the phone, you know it's a really horrible experience," she says.

"I asked people, 'What do you do about brainstorming?' And they said, 'Well, we save that until we get together.' So I asked, 'How often does your team get together?' They said, 'Once a year, twice a year.'"

Then Dave Douglas issued his challenge to the engineering community.

"One of the things that really struck me," Yankelovich says, "was that virtual worlds such as Second Life had the promise of addressing some of the issues around informal communication that the work-from-home people were facing."

"But when we started getting into it, we saw there were drawbacks to Second Life, and that's what prompted us to build our own software," she says.

"In Second Life you can't use your real name, and there's no authentication, so you can't guarantee that anyone is who they say they are."

In short, not a good environment for working on confidential projects.

So the team created the Project Wonderland toolkit and used it to build MPK 20, a virtual addition the Sun's real-estate portfolio.

"For us, the big thing was being able to put live applications in the world. That seemed key to us for business collaboration. And we put the emphasis on audio communication rather than text chat," she says.

"From a cognitive point of view, you can look at an application and talk; it's hard to look at an application and type. "

Besides, the team had already developed Meeting Suite -- conferencing software that brings people closer together by making explicit who is in the meeting and who is currently speaking -- which they could easily integrate into MPK 20.

Yankelovich and the rest of the team are currently working on the second version of Wonderland.

Like the first version, this one enables people to create virtual worlds suitable for business and education collaboration -- worlds that integrate with web services and enterprise data. But the newer version (still a 0.5 release) provides more robust security, better scalability, and dramatically improved graphics and avatars.

"One particularly exciting new feature is the ability to incorporate models from the Google 3D Warehouse and use tools inside Wonderland to move and position the imported objects," she says.

The first developer preview of this new software was issued in December 2008, and the team expects to produce monthly developer previews until the end-user release is finalized sometime during the summer. In anticipation of the summer release, early adopters in the Wonderland open-source community with Java programming skills have started building worlds based on the developer previews.

"This is going to bring us one step closer to our ultimate goal," Yankelovich says. "We envision a 3-D web where many companies and individuals will host their own virtual worlds. Avatars will be able to move seamlessly from one world to the next in much the same way as people can currently navigate from one web site to another."