I’ve tried this sort of thing at a previous employer. In short, this is skeuomorphism raised to … some large power. Focusing on the looks of whether or not we’

I’ve tried this sort of thing at a previous employer. In short, this is skeuomorphism raised to … some large power. Focusing on the looks of whether or not we’re in the right virtual space unfortunately detracts from the actual communications themselves. We don’t need to rebuild a full 3d virtual office where everyone has a personal avatar to wander around the space, in order to communicate with our office mates. If you want that, just go build your office in Second Life. But keep in mind that there’s a reason why Second Life doesn’t have a population of hundreds of millions of people — that concept doesn’t scale, and there are many of us who actively avoid 3D MMOs.