Online virtual worlds have been around for a long time and interest in them is enormous - in a report titled "Market Forecasts for Virtual World Experiences" published in June, 2008, Strategy Analytics predicted that 22% of global broadband users would register for one or more virtual worlds, resulting in a market of 1 billion users worth about $8 billion (note that these figures are hard to verify due to a lot of confusion in the market about the number of registrants, frequent users, and numbers of avatars).

As exciting as this market may sound most of the business forays in virtual worlds have only really been a matter of dipping a toe in the water. For example, IBM’s Virtual Green Data Center (VGDC) at the company’s Virtual Business Center Island got a lot of press, but I’ve seen no evidence that this was a more effective selling tool than, say, a sales call.

So historically we could argue that the most compelling business opportunity in virtual worlds has been for consumer brands to connect with customers. A new service, Glasshouse by Green Phosphor, could change this.

Glasshouse provides a compelling reason for corporate knowledge workers to join virtual world services such as Second Life and Sun’s Wonderland.

Glasshouse is a gateway that creates a 3D representation of data in a target virtual world. Virtual world participants can interact with the data by viewing it from different angles, interacting with the data, and drilling down.

Most of Green Phosphor’s focus is on the biotech market and, given the richness and complexity of this data, the Glasshouse results are stunningly effective. What’s even more powerful about this approach is that it allows for collaboration so groups can share and explore complex data sets.

Glasshouse can work with data from Excel spreadsheets or SQL databases and uses Green Phosphor’s Content Injection and Control Protocol (CICP) that supports the presentation of data across multiple virtual world platforms.

The company’s beta release provides a client-side Java applet that interfaces between your data and the Green Phosphor CICP Hub that routes the 3D rendition of the data to your target virtual world.

Green Phosphor also plans to release a virtual world appliance so that companies can create private 3D environments based on Sun’s Wonderland.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.