Project planning in a virtual world: Information management metamorphosis or technology going too far?

The paper considers the emerging technology of virtual reality (VR) as a tool to help manage and make sense of complex management information systems. Project management is taken as an example business system, with broad commercial and industrial applications, that depend on the efficient and effective communication of information at several organizational levels to succeed. The use of a virtual world, having three physical dimensions and a time dimension, as a metaphor to represent planning, sequencing, and scheduling information in a way that improves the communication process is considered. Examples of how the technology has been used to date are given. The technology is shown to have a lot to offer complex information environments such as large projects. However, there are clearly gaps in how the technology can be used cost effectively and how far the concept of a virtual world should be taken as a replacement for more traditional, two dimensional and symbolic, methods of communicating information.