Many of the readers of this blog will have seen Sametime 3D demonstrated in the Innovation Lab at Lotusphere2009, or if not, may have seen a presentation on YouTube – I blogged about it back in March.
Today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Sametime 3D will be announced as a product available for purchase, Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime (VCS).
VCS was created by IBM Research and developed in its development labs. Organisations in a variety of industries ranging from aerospace and defense, consumer products, staffing, manufacturing, and education, including Manpower, Northeastern University, and Northcentral Technical College of Wisconsin all have participated in Sametime 3D pilots over the last six months.
Using VCS, users can select colleagues from their Lotus Sametime contact list, and then invite them to participate in a virtual meeting. Participants can meet in a boardroom, an auditorium or a collaboration space.
Once they enter the virtual meeting, avatars can use text or voice chat, or both, to communicate. They can then share presentations or other materials, and take notes using virtual flip charts. In the collaboration space, they can share ideas and other information on a brainstorm wall. Participants can then store, update, prioritize and vote on this information. Content can be imported and acted upon both in and out of the virtual meeting space.
This new demo tells us more: