3D Virtual Worlds and Technical Communication: One More Tool in the Kit

摘要

Blogs, wikis, Facebook, Myspace, and now there's Second Life, There, Qwaq, and a host of other three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds for socializing, gaming, learning, and doing just about anything else that a real person can do. As you may know, especially if you are a Second Life resident, IBM has a 24-hour staffed support center in Second Life, Best Buy's Geek Squad has a support island in Second Life, and Sweden opened a virtual "embassy" in Second Life last spring. And that's just Second Life. What happens when we, the information experts, don't control the information anymore? What happens when a community constructs the information about a product or task? And what happens when we can't organize information according to users' cognitive maps anymore because they can "fly" and literally see the entire information space at once? Or what happens when they choose to "walk" that way when we wanted them to walk this way? Do our information architectures break down when the information becomes truly spatial rather than an abstract hierarchy that we can predict through a card sort?