SECOND LIFE, Sept 3 (Reuters) - IBM, a company long at the forefront of exploring the business applications of virtual worlds, announced on Wednesday it has added support for 3D chat to its Lotus Sametime instant messaging software.

Users of “Sametime 3D” who are collaborating on a business document will be able to meet in a variety of virtual worlds, with IBM’s software handling the logins transparently, said Neil Katz, a company spokesman who worked on the project. Platforms supported by IBM include OpenSim, SecondLife, Forterra, and ActiveWorlds.

Katz said IBM will initially be working with select customers to test the new software’s capabilities, before rolling it out to the mainstream.

IBM foresees uses for corporate 3D chat such as walking customers through the replacement of a computer part by rezzing a 3D model. The Sametime 3D integration also smooths the process of importing data from an application such as Powerpoint into a virtual world.

IBM already hosts private regions within Second Life, and is working to draft interoperability protocols that connect disparate virtual worlds.

While reliability issues have plagued virtual worlds such as Second Life, corporate applications may be made to run in a more stable manner, particularly using OpenSim.

“We’re creating a room with 20 or 30 users, we’re not building a persistent virtual world with thousands or hundreds of thousands of concurrent users,” he said.

Original post by Eric Reuters