Virtual worlds as adjustable environments for immersion in business meetings

Managing modern organizations requires innovative measures to facilitate interaction. In this paper, we focus on interaction mechanisms, such as business meetings. We attempt to highlight the possible contributions of virtual worlds in terms of such organizational mechanisms. This original work presents a review of the literature about business meetings and their structural properties. It also presents the specific properties of virtual worlds that serve as a mechanism for facilitating the interaction of multiple participants. Our research demonstrates that immersion is a property common to both meetings and virtual worlds. This immersion is expressed in a wide range of forms that are described in this paper

Seeking the Entanglement of Immersion and Emergence: Reflections from an Analysis of the State of IS Research on Virtual Worlds

This paper critically reviews the state of virtual world research within the Information Systems field; revealing areas of interest evident in research studies between 2007-2011, the methods employed to conduct such research, the theories/frameworks used to ground VW research, as well as reoccurring memes/concepts. We argue that virtual worlds are best interpreted as both an immersive and emergent co-creative process, ‘performed’ by users’ actions and interactions both with other users and with artifacts such as virtual goods. Nevertheless, our analysis reveals a near neglect of the substantive nature of digital materiality and of the emergent nature of virtual worlds. We conclude that this ‘human-centric’ stance has taken focus away from the unique nature of the virtual world artifact itself, and posit a research agenda that focuses on virtual world objects as well as the immersive and emergent activities of ‘world-builders’ as necessary to advance virtual world research