Metaverse Virtual Radio

Corporate Planners Unlimited announced today that it was expanding its Virtualis Convention and Learning Center in Second Life due to increased demand. The specific expansion is to add in parcels of land to support events for hundreds of visitors, but President and Creative Director Dan Parks is seeing a growth in the business of hosting virtual events and meetings overall.

"When we first started, most of the people who contacted us were techies or the person in charge of a meeting who was not necessarily a professional, but had been given the directions that budgets had been cut. Now the phone calls I'm getting are mostly from IT people and CFOs. The last five phone calls I've had were from the CFOs' office, which is a really telling sign of what's going on with our economy," commented Parks.

Parks has hosted 15 events in Virtualis since its grand opening in May of last year for a variety of clients, including, recently, Trend Micro. Parks points to the event as an example of the creative options that Second Life affords and he says set it apart from other environments for meetins like Unisfair or ON24.

In the 2-day event [video above], attendees visited the standard sessions and networking events, but also went on team-building exercises like sky diving and treasure hunts. When Trend Micro returns for their next planned meeting, attendees will fly into a giant CPU for the opening reception.

"It's so much more of a creative environment. One of the things I was very conscious of when creating this is that I didn't want to take jobs away from meeting planners. I don't want to be negative about any of these environments because I think they're going to all be very important in the way we do business. But with Second Life the meeting planner is still very involved because everything can be branded and customized. There are literally thousands of decisions to be made, and it mirrors the real world in a lot of ways," said Parks.

It is, often, about business, though. Parks and his team are currently working on an event for an organization with an over ten-years-old physical event for 300 attendees and exhibitors. The group is keeping the physical event, but wanted to cut custs by taking the exhibits virtual. Instead of showing off booths for four days, exhibitors will now have virtual booths keyed to automatically notify the companies when visitors drop by over a month. The savings, say Parks, amount to knocking $175,000 off the budget.

"They can accomplish a lot of the same functions. All the exposure the exhibitors would have gotten, they'll still get. But instead of shipping in booths and equipment, reserving hotels, taking up space, they can scrap all of that," he explained. "And the cost factor they have for us is about 5%."

The costs for each event vary based on the level of customization, training, and assistance required, but are overall still cheaper than physical events. Organizations across the board are looking to cut costs and turning to virtual events, but so are some providers.

Parks says he is in talks with a hotel chain about providing virtual events and meeting spaces as an alternative to their physical events business. One option is to duplicate all of the hotel's breakout rooms. If a client wants to expand from their initial space and meet up with others for small sessions and the hotel doesn't have space to accomodate them all, the experience can be re-created from attendees' hotel rooms or a computer bank provided by the hotel.

"We're finding applications and ways of blending the virtual and real world to criss cross in both directions," said Parks.

It seems to be a need. Parks, who is a co-founder of MeCo, the Meetings Community network of 2,500 meetings professionals, says that professional events organizations and companies are beginning to promote virtual alternatives. It makes sense: the more physical events planners can be involved in the virtual side of things, the less market share they stand to lose in the economic downturn. At a recent event in Chicago, said Parks, a professional event company brought a group of representatives, including those from 7-8 Fortune 100 companies, into Second Life for a tour. Parks says he himself has conducted between 400 and 500 tours of Virtualis for organizations looking for virtual events solutions.

With the fiscal crunch keeping travel and meetings budgets down, he expects more people to look at virtual events as an alternative.

"When this started, this was all an experiment for me. I had no idea the world was going to turn the way it did last year. I thought we had a window of a couple years to play with this. I no longer do," he said. "I thought I was way ahead of the curve. Now I think everyone is catching up."