New Branded And Mission Specific Virtual Environments
“New Innovation Design Center Helps K-C and Retailers Explore Store Design, Merchandising and Product Concepts Based on Consumer Insights”.
“Kimberly-Clark Corporation today announced the opening of its new Innovation Design Studio, incorporating use of a proprietary virtual reality system to help identify innovations, gain key insights and strengthen customer relationships. Located in Neenah, Wis., the facility represents a powerful addition to K-C’s product, marketing research and customer development toolkits — further advancing those capabilities that touch customers, shoppers and users”.
A year ago, J. Mears and A. Bednarz’ article did a nice job at summarizing what IBM, Sun and Intel were doing in Second Life, exploring the potential of interacting with customers in immersive virtual environments. Most recently, Wired’s F. Rose pointed out that Madison Avenue is wasting time and efforts in this kind of activities. As usual, when dealing with emerging trends all kinds of reports surface in favor and against the matter.
I have expressed concerns about why anyone would think of Second Life as a mass market development as well as questioning why “players” would massively and spontaneously go to a specific corporate island without providing them with a clear incentive, motivation or compelling rewards to do so.
At a very high level, there is marketing value in hosting highly targeted activities, many of which require working on making a very specific audience become aware of events to begin with, while enabling online viral marketing tools to make the most of both 2D and 3D tools:
“Virtual Reality enables better business outcomes in HP Business Technology Center. The newly opened HP Business Technology Center focuses on the challenges businesses of all sizes face today-enabling growth, lowering cost and mitigating risk. Learn how HP answers these challenges in a rich media, multi-dimensional, interactive environment”.
Talking about Second Life’s aftermath, it should be noted that corporations are not exactly jumping ship, but switching tracks by owning their own virtual worlds, where they can provide significantly improved graphics and interfaces, as well as being fully in charge of the quality of experience. HP’s Business Technology Center being an example.
Virtual reality can be part of experiential marketing programs enabling participants to provide input on a variety of “virtual mock-ups”, gathering preliminary insights on consumer perceptions and behaviors in advance to productizing. Back in 1991 one of my papers captured that concept when talking about DSPEO, a Spanish acronym I came up with, which in English translates into “Design & Simulation of Ergonomic Products”. See my posts on Heliodisplay and Minority Report GUIs.
From a research standpoint, there is also interest in exploring the potential of advanced collaboration tools leveraging 3D graphical user interfaces, which will lead to improved applications and new ways to expose greater amounts of relevant information to users making it easier to browse, search and discover content, as well as connecting virtual worlds with daily activities by means of augmented reality tools.
José de Francisco 
Chicago, 4 October 07 
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“The Top 10″ at the time of uploading this post: [1] Design Concepts: Future Car. [2] Bionics, Biomimetics, Biognosis, Biomimicry, or Bionical Creativity Engineering. [3] “Visual Futurist: The Art & Life Of Syd Mead”. [4] Innovative Mobile Phones: Objects Of Desire. [5] QoE Research: Defining & Studying “Personas”. [6] When Innovation Gets Commoditized Or Superseded. [7] Innovation Coolhunting In South Korea. [8] The Economist & Technology Review: “Lessons From Apple’s Design”. [9] Mobile Applications (1). [10] “Top 25 Most Innovative Companies” By BusinessWeek And BCG.
