SLMeetingRoom: A model of environment to remote support meetings, oriented tasks with small groups for Second Life

3D virtual worlds are typically designed to reproduce the physical world, both in the features of the meeting place and also in how people interact with each other. We try to get a better understanding of technical and behavioral issues found in different meeting environments designed for collaborative work. From the problems that we have found, we proposed the SLMeetingRoom, as a model of environment for work meetings which is composed of a set of components to support basic working activities in Second Life. We also performed a pilot study under four different conditions of communication: face-to-face, videoconference, Second Life without the SLMeetingRoom and Second Life with the SLMeetingRoom. The pilot study pointed out that the SLMeetingRoom model is a promising environment according to the criteria: cognitive effort and sense of presence, however, for tasks completeness and participation level, we could not find statistical evidence to support our research hypotheses.