Divining Value
Dr. Mitzi Montoya measures the perceived value of virtual reality.
By Patrick Jones
My interview with Dr. Mitzi Montoya, a leading researcher in computer-based virtual environments, is set in a real coffee shop, face to face. The irony is not lost on me. Ideally, our meeting would take place in the online realm that garners much of her academic focus these days-"in world"-however, my not-yet-birthed avatar would probably be technically challenged and keep her experienced digital alter ego waiting for days.
Online virtual worlds are making great strides and becoming increasingly "real," but the value of face-to-face meetings cannot be duplicated, according to Montoya, Zelnak Professor of Marketing Innovation in the Department of Business Management at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C.
Montoya's current research and publishing pursuits focus on measuring the effectiveness of virtual worlds as a valuable business tool. She and colleague Dr. Anne Massey, Dean's Research Professor in Information Systems at Indiana University, have developed a measurement scale to assess the perceived reality of and the value of interaction in virtual worlds-something they call Perceived Virtual Presence (PVP).
When Montoya and her research team announced the PVP scale late last year, she said the more "present" users feel in virtual worlds, the greater the effectiveness of training, collaboration, education or presentation.
"PVP is the whole idea of projecting yourself into the [virtual] environment," Montoya says, sitting across from me at a real table over a real cup of coffee in a real cafe where the aromas cannot be digitally synthesized. "We talk about it along three dimensions. We talk about feeling immersed in the environment or feeling like you are there. It is also about being absorbed in whatever task you are supposed to be working on. And then it is being engaged with the other people so that you have the sense that the avatar that you are looking at is the other person that you are working with. Those are the three dimensions: environment, task and people orientation. There are measures to those relationships. Technically, how you get there is you ask people a battery of questions and try to identify the underlying dimensions that are behind what people are saying."
In sports, getting lost in the moment and performing at your best is commonly called "being in the zone." In psychology, it's called "flow"-a state of mind that leads to maximum productivity.
"It is the sense of getting lost in the moment," Montoya says. "A lot of research has been done that looks at high-performance athletes. When they flow, and when they are in the moment, they are not breaking down how they are performing at their peak. For instance, in basketball, they see the court and just know where to be and what to do."
Read a book and you can visualize and become absorbed in the story. That's flow, she says, and the same concept applies with virtual worlds.
"So how do you break that perceived virtual presence down and measure it and relate it to people working better this way than other ways? Does it matter or is it a waste of time? Those are all really important questions," she says. "What if [a virtual world] is just a flashy environment that, frankly, is a waste of time? Companies need to know that information. The whole focus of what I look at is how people work collaboratively and the best way to do so."
Montoya reaches for a sip of coffee and looks me directly in the eye, highlighting an important point.
"Virtual technologies are certainly not better than face to face," she says. "That is still the richest form of communication. Setting that aside and, now, looking at how [virtual worlds] compare to other technologies, you have additional non-verbal cues. And you have a different sense of being there with the other person or avatar representation, if you will, than you do over the phone. It is part of the ability to look at objects interacting together and to have a sense of being there. That is the whole idea of presence. It makes a difference in how people interact and engage."
Back to the Future
Montoya has been a professor at North Carolina State University since 1995. She graduated with an engineering degree from Michigan State University and worked for a few years in the automotive industry as a design engineer before returning to the academic world.
Her father an electrical engineer, Montoya's fascination for technology came about naturally.
"He said I could study anything I wanted in any of the engineering disciplines," Montoya says, grinning. "So he had a strong hand in saying I could be any kind of engineer I wanted to be as long as I was an engineer. And I have said the same thing to my eldest son. I think it is great advice. You can do anything you want out of the college of engineering."
Montoya returned to Michigan State to earn a doctorate in marketing, which, on first take, seems an unusual blend of academic study to complement her engineering discipline.
Not so fast, says Montoya, who can logically walk you through the connections and explain precisely how she found her niche and calling.
"If you think about it, a new product or service has to be both well designed and it has to meet some need in the market," she says. "The reason we see such high failure rates in product development is because it could be a great design-brilliant engineering-but no one wants it. Or people want it, but if it is not well designed, then you completely missed the mark."
Engineering and marketing must communicate with each other-product innovation is a very interdisciplinary process, she says,
"So, by accident, my random [academic path] led me right to where I needed to be in terms of having the different perspectives that you really should have in place to study innovation as a process and the decision making in that process."
Montoya, 40, has spent much of the past two decades researching innovation and new product development. She is at the forefront of learning how teams make decisions while utilizing the best available technological tools.
"As the working world has changed and people have become more distributed around the globe to do that work, my primary area of research is on virtual teams," Montoya says. "That work, for the most part, has been supported by traditional media such as e-mail and collaborative software. Artificial environments are simply a new way to support virtual collaborations."
Those not yet familiar with virtual worlds may cringe at what sounds like pulp science fiction. But for those quick to poo-poo the new, consider as you're Googling today that 15 years ago you probably didn't anticipate your life revolving around the World Wide Web.
"I can frankly tell you that the first time I ever saw a virtual world, I thought it was the stupidest thing that I had ever seen," Montoya says, laughing. "However, I will also tell you that we are looking at the bubble of a new generation of the workforce that grew up in the gaming generation, or whatever you want to call them. This is their world and this is their environment."
Montoya's two sons, 15 and 11, think it's hilarious that their mother is working with virtual worlds-naturally, a relative of video games-in her research.
"But it is very natural for them. It is very natural for the younger generations in terms of how they are comfortable interacting. So we started studying [virtual worlds] and what we see is there are some huge benefits from the collaboration it allows. Collaboration is what most of work is about, right?"
Montoya elaborates on the embrace of technology by today's youth-last year, one of her peers co-wrote an article published in the Harvard Business Review, "Leadership's Online Labs," that studied gaming behavior to identify leadership characteristics.
"It was fascinating," she says. "There are great examples that you see in [gaming] leadership behavior that is exactly what you need in management. If companies had some sense, they would pay attention to that and recruit from the gaming world."
In fact, leading technology companies such as IBM, Nortel, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have developed their own proprietary, behind-the-corporate-firewall virtual worlds that promise to revolutionize the way their global workforces partner and train.
There are large obstacles, however, for gaming aficionados expecting to zoom into the executive ranks.
"It is very early in the acceptance and understanding of virtual worlds," Montoya says. "I did a recent presentation where most of the CEOs were in their 60s and said, 'This is crazy. It looks like a waste of time.' And, you know what, I get that. But it is what the upcoming and younger workforce is expecting. The leading-edge tech companies are using this. But the mainstream companies that are not tech-based are not using it yet. They'll wait. And there is some value in that. Because by the time they are ready, a more stable and simple solution will be available."
The steady surge in the popularity of collaborative virtual environments could have significant implications for everyone in the corporate environment, and that includes those in the global meeting and event industry, according to Montoya.
"It is no secret that a lot of companies have cut down on travel or cut out travel completely," Montoya says. "They are suspending attendance to events and meetings. So if you are going to have to listen to an event by teleconference, it is death by PowerPoint. Personally, I put my phone on mute and focus on other things. It is definitely more engaging if I can go into a virtual world and there are things for me to do and not just sit and listen. I can do. I can interact with other people or objects."
Navigating on her laptop with the deftness of a professional driver behind the wheel of a Ferrari, Montoya demonstrates some of the possibilities in a virtual world. Her avatar strolls into a large conference hall, searches for an available chair and takes a seat. A presentation is loaded on the wide screen behind the stage and the event is ready to start at its scheduled time. Montoya can turn her avatar to her neighbor and talk shop or discuss the weather.
"I think [virtual worlds] are a complementary technology-a new skill set that meeting and event planners need to learn and figure out," she says. "There are actually a lot of complications in playing host to a virtual event because you have a lot of people of different skill sets that might want to come. So now, instead of arranging air travel and hotels, you are arranging avatars. It is a non-complicated process to design your own avatar, but it is a huge hindrance to people just getting started. There are things that [planners] can do to simplify that."
Planners can potentially set up attendees with unique avatars, passwords and login information.
"There could be a whole new service business that arises around the ability to facilitate your clients' entrance into and movement through a virtual event," Montoya says. "And maybe a virtual event precedes another live event as a primer. I look at it as a way for [meeting and event planners] to supplement what they are currently doing."
The ROI of PVP
Naysayers to the ultimate success of virtual worlds should start work on developing an avatar with a more optimistic outlook. Montoya says that the early results of her research confirm the burgeoning success of collaborative virtual worlds-and PVP is one of the key cogs in its long-term success.
"A lot of it is about the quality of the experience," Montoya says. "As a researcher, I break our results down and try to say, 'OK, are there really performance benefits to working this way versus that way?' That is the nature of the studies that we design. And then you have to step back and say, 'Are we seeing performance benefits?' The short answer is, yes, we are seeing benefits in collaborative efforts through this technology."
After a non-avatar handshake, Montoya logs off of her laptop, takes a final sip of her coffee and heads back into the real world to further her research into the future of virtual worlds.
PATRICK JONES is freelance writer based outside of Raleigh, N.C.