I recently stumbled onto a great dialog around a New York Times article titled ‘We have the met the enemy and he is PowerPoint‘.  The articles goes into detail about various uses of PPT, particularly in the military, and how it is often abused.  This sparked Ron Burns, CEO or virtual world platform provider Proton Media, to post some thoughts on leveraging 3-D spaces vs. 2-D PPTs in many situations.  Ron’s post then prompted some other industry folks from the likes if Microsoft and Cisco to weigh in on the discussion of PPT vs. 3-D alternatives. 

You can read all the blog posts in the discussion over on Proton Media’s blog.

Personally, I do see and agree with a lot of their points.  But the roadblocks for the shift are rather large:

• Time to develop a similar message in a 3D space is longer, especially for those without experience.
• The comfort factor of PPT.  People create PPT presentations frequently and (arguably) know the tool.
• Custom software required for both presenters and audience members, including account creation processes, if using 3D software.

We’re still going to see continued growth in the 3D space in business and education, but we have some early hurdles that need addressed for most of our audiences to get past the early adopter phase.