Bluegrass: Lessons for Deploying Virtual Worlds Within the Enterprise

This paper describes the challenges of deploying current, state-of-the-art virtual worlds within the typical enterprise. We start by describing Bluegrass, our prototype desktop virtual world embedded in a collaborative software devel- opment environment. Then we discuss some of the issues we encountered while trying to deploy Bluegrass to test its effectiveness in improving the distributed software devel- opment process. While some of the issues are specific to Bluegrass, we conclude that a number of the issues are common to any similar sort of virtual world. We call for the development of new virtual world technologies, light- weight and focusing more on people rather than places, to more effectively test their usefulness within the enterprise. Author Keywords Collaborative virtual environments, collaborative software development, computer-supported cooperative work.