Hong Kong Net Participating Universities — Graduate Studies and Research
Education, Research and Development, Graduate Studies
The Alpine Executive Center sponsors ongoing research and development for meeting support tools to improve business meeting processes in the virtual world, and actively engages students woking on individual research projects or classroom programs with multiple universities. The Center routinely hosts educational programs and MBA classes at major universities.
Hong Kong Net Cooperative Education Program |
| The Hong Kong Net education program takes place in Second Life at the Alpine Executive Center during September, October and November. Ninety (90) graduate and undergraduate students from four universities experience working in multicultural distributed teams collaborating with team members from other continents and cultures on assignments. These virtual teams research current IT developments and software related fields, and produce reports that integrate an Asian, American and European perspective of their subjects. |
Students doing research at the Center focus on developing and implementing meeting support tools and the processes that make meetings in the virtual 3D space successful. Their research includes designing tools that take advantage of the 3D characteristics of the virtual world while also satisfying remote meeting participants by keeping them actively engaged. Their research and ongoing development of tools typically concludes a series of evaluation sessions by general users to collect feedback through focus groups and surveys. |
Spatial Meeting Support Tools |
Our tools are designed to take advantage of the three dimentional potential of virtual worlds. This is accomplished by supporting the visualization of parallel contributions and by enabling the visualization of the meeting process. By making the 3-D interface of the meeting support tools understandable and easy to use, we are able to increase sociability and the feeling of co-presence, while actively engaging the participants in the meeting process. The space provided in virtual worlds improve the feeling of working in a group in which each individual action has a contributing effect on the results. The interactive tools keep activities intereresting and fun while helping to drive a manageable and realistic process with documented protocols that are instantly available to the dispersed workers. |
See you in-world at the Alpine Executive Center