Avaya trains sales reps virtually – Hypergrid Business

The flight simulator celebrated its 100s anniversary a couple of years ago. A training rig was developed in 1909 to help pilots operate the control wheels of the early monoplanes in a safe environment and its predecessors have been a mainstay of pilot training ever since. Translating this concept to a “social simulator” to help practice interpersonal skills like “executive selling” has proven harder.

While we wouldn’t fly with a pilot that learned about flying from a PowerPoint presentation and answered multiple choice questions, most sales organizations are content with this industrial model of training. Sales reps don’t routinely practice and fail in a safe simulation environment the way pilots do.

Avaya’s sales organization is determined to change that.

Working in partnership with its global sales organization and Visualize Inc., we created a “Virtual Rehearsal Studio” in its own web.alive environment.

“The purpose with our session in web.alive was to run a collaborative learning and rehearsal session without the travel costs and time of class room training,” said Rhonda Duesterberg, Avaya’s senior manager for global sales learning and development.

Sales representatives practice preparing for a customer visit and role-playing customer conversations in the 3D immersive environment.

(IBM’s Virtual Center runs on the web.alive platform, and is open for social business collaborations, meetings, events and other applications.)

IBM Centennial: Icons of Progress 3D Gallery on the IBM Global Business Services Virtual Center

Visit our new and improved 3D meeting space, which now includes graphics from the Icons of Progress program featuring 100 key stories about innovations at IBM over the last century. Each graphic will open a tab browser to the respective story on http://www.ibm100.com.

The Virtual Center is an easy-to-use, web-based and voice enabled venue for 3D meetings, discussions, presentations and other kinds of events. We will be organizing receptions for the 3D Icons of Progress Gallery soon, but in the meantime you are welcome to visit anytime.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

Most highlighted quote on Kindle ebook: “The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.”

 Videogame Engine Serves Up Free Brain Imagery for All | Magazine

Mark Ellisman wants neuroscientists to share. Typically, they don’t: Data on brain structures, painstakingly accumulated using neuroimaging technologies and dissections, usually belongs to individual researchers, labs, and journals. So Ellisman, a neuroscientist at UC San Diego, started working on the Whole Brain Catalog, an open source, open-access database of mouse brain imagery. Think of it as Google Earth for rodent neurology—if Google Earth were based on a videogame engine and could zoom from the scale of a continent to a ladybug. “That’s the range we traverse, but in 3-D,” Ellisman says. Download the software and you get visualizations and videos ranging from the structure of the entire brain to individual neurons. And many of the renders link to the data they’re built from, like the massive (and massively well-funded) Allen Brain Atlas or the Neuroscience Information Framework, run by the National Institutes of Health. A handful of labs have also donated their work—the Salk Institute’s Fred Gage contributed a 2-D simulation of nerve cell growth in adult mice, and Ellisman’s team adjusted the pacing to run in real time, eventually posting it to the catalog as a “4-D simulation.”

It’s No Game: DOD Uses Virtual Reality to Treat PTSD

In the blockbuster movie “Avatar,” virtual reality is used to return a physically disabled soldier back to a more normal life. The movie takes place in the distant future and is clearly science fiction. Even so, military psychologists are using virtual reality today to help Iraq War veterans recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Using the system, the medical professionals can re-create a combat situation such as an attack, an explosion or an ambush, and help the veteran work through the elements of that situation that triggered the stress. The system was developed as part of a joint effort that involved the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Army, along with the University of Southern California and the virtual reality development company Virtually Better Inc. Working together, the groups produced a system dubbed Virtual Iraq, which electronically re-creates Iraqi environments. The system uses graphics to deliver a video game-like display, as well as sounds and even smells, to help those suffering from PTSD revisit the events that affected them.

smarterplanet:

 Avatars rising in the enterprise | VizWorld.com

Virtual worlds, particularly worlds like Second Life, are rapidly becoming more popular for enterprises and government agencies as global-meeting places where people can talk and interact without having to deal with the expense and trials of planes and hotels. An article over at ComputerWorld discusses how several companies have begun to integrate virtual worlds into their regular workflow, focusing heavily on the US Naval Undersea Warfare Center. 

(FYI: Visit the Analytics Virtual Center to experience IBM’s collaboration space based on the web.alive platform)