For emergency responders working along Interstate 95, accidents aren't a game; they're a way of life (and death). So it seemed odd to a group of firefighters, cops and medics when researchers from the University of Maryland suggested it use a virtual world to collaborate on training for rollovers, multicar pileups and life-threatening injuries.

The phrase virtual world is often associated with Second Life, the much-hyped 3-D environment hosted by Linden Lab that allows users to talk to friends, sell T-shirts, fly around on carpets and even build amusement parks—in other words, to play. At first, the emergency responders who make up the I-95 Corridor Coalition didn't take seriously the idea of a virtual world as a training tool, says Michael Pack, director of research with the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Transportation Technology.

"It wasn't until we started to do elaborate demos that the first responders started to realize the true potential," says Pack, who has since begun rolling out a virtual world pilot project that could accommodate training for hundreds of emergency workers.

A University of Maryland project creates a virtual training exercise for first-responders working on Interstate 95.

In fact, as the consumer buzz over Second Life has faded, organizations like the I-95 Corridor Coalition, accountancy Pricewaterhouse and healthcare technology provider Greenleaf Medical have quietly explored business uses for virtual worlds. From setting up 3-D environments for geographically dispersed workers to giving therapy to troubled teens, early adopters are testing virtual worlds as a collaborative tool.

Industry analysts and developers of virtual worlds believe that by immersing users in an interactive environment that allows for social interactions, virtual worlds have the potential to succeed where other collaborative technologies, like teleconferencing, have failed. Phone-based meetings begin and end abruptly, at the mercy of the person or service administering it. In a virtual world, conversations between employees can continue within the virtual space—just like they do in company hallways after a meeting ends. "The informality of a virtual world can lead to great conversations," says Roo Reynolds, a Metaverse evangelist with IBM. Metaverse is a virtual world for Big Blue employees. "It leads to discussions that otherwise would have been missed with the formality of older technologies."

However, businesses must overcome many technical and cultural obstacles before they adopt virtual worlds on a major scale. The technology often lacks robust audio capabilities that business users need to communicate, and it can be frustratingly slow without a high-performance desktop. Meanwhile, users have to get over the novelty of working as their virtual selves. And there's a learning curve for older workers who didn't grow up with richly rendered video games.