Online virtual worlds offer exciting new opportunities for enterprises or businesses. To exploit these opportunities enterprises need to find a way to integrate virtual world services with their real-world services, and to exploit virtual worlds rich collaboration environment to offer new or enhanced services. However, there are many challenges to realizing these goals, such as resolving virtual and real identifications, controlling communication sessions between real and virtual world entities, and managing resources in both worlds. In this paper, we study these issues and propose a framework for integrating virtual worlds into enterprise service work flow. We implemented a customer service in a VW contact center that is integrated with corresponding enterprise services. We also present a novel mechanism in virtual worlds that allow users to bring their own resources, along with the contact center resources, and share the resources with other customers or agents to resolve customer issues. Further, we present experiences from our prototype.

A novel teleoperation interface is introduced featuring an integrated virtual reality based simulation augmented by sensors and image processing capabilities on-board the remotely operated vehicle. The system addresses the typical limitations of video-based teleoperation caused by signal lag and limited field of view, allowing the operator to navigate in a continuous fashion. It also incorporates temporary autonomous operation of the vehicle enabling local obstacle navigation and automatic re-establishment of its teleoperated state. Finally, the system provides real time update of the virtual environment based on anomalies encountered by the vehicle. Future work is focused on incorporating dynamic moving objects in the environment

Online virtual worlds are attracting businesses that intend to offer new enterprise class services. Often, these services in virtual worlds are closely linked with the real enterprise resources. For a successful deployment of these services, a mixed reality model with communications that extend the virtual worlds to enterprise resources is required. In this paper, we take a look at this new class of collaborative applications by using a customer service application as an example. We discuss various issues in offering such a service, lay out the requirements, propose an architecture for mixed reality communications, and present our prototype implementation. We believe that this example service can introduce a mixed reality based communication paradigm that is applicable to a wide range of other business or enterprise services.