Just out last week: a survey report from Erica and Sam Driver of ThinkBalm on the business value of immersive internet technologies and applications. By “immersive internet” they mean a culture developing around a media-rich cloud of emerging technologies including virtual worlds, mobile devices, social apps, the semantic web, and gaming.
Key findings are nicely summarized here. This report supports our own findings at FXPAL in experimenting with different uses of several different virtual world platforms: “The most common barriers to adoption are target users having inadequate hardware, corporate security restrictions, and getting users interested in the technology.”