IBM has been super busy in Second Life lately. They have over 1000 employees doing collaboration and work in the environment already. Their CEO jumped in for an event while in Beijing not long ago, evidently.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s innovation guy, is quoted in this CNet article. He and others are really starting to legitimize the idea of this “entertainment” medium as a serious, valuable way to understand information and experience and collaborate with other people.

IBM to give birth to ‘Second Life’ business group | CNET News.com

Second Life is one of the main areas in the new IBM group, but not the only one, Wladawsky-Berger said. “I really believe that highly visual and collaborative interfaces will become very important in the way we interact with all IT applications in the future,” he said.

Virtual reality connects directly with the human mind, he added. “There is something very human about visual interfaces. I almost think of text-based interfaces, including browsers, as ‘narrowband’ into our brains, whereas visual interfaces are ‘broadband’ into our brains.”