It’s no secret that IBM has been experimenting with Second Life and other virtual world platforms for some time. More recently the “desire to have a more secure intranet environment where we can meet and explore the potential technology and social implications” has prompted the addition of Garage Games’ low-cost Torque engine to their arsenal, according to the eightbar blog this week. “Now before any purists jump in this and say, ‘but that’s a game engine not an MMO engine you can only host _n people at a time’ let me explain. Torque lets us run controlled game style servers, even run locally and host our own ‘meeting rooms’ but we are customizing elements to hook into or existing communication systems. e.g. we have a large corporate index of employees called bluepages, we have single sign on to the intranet (and hence know who we are) and we have a set of services being built to access any of the data we need. We also already have a corporate wide Sametime messaging service and products on the way such as Lotus connections for deeper connectivity across existing channels. What we need is the ability to gather some people together and use the human aspects of the avatar interaction to be more effective in our communications. Part of the investigation is to treat this as another client for web based services. So the services we build can then be consumed by any metaverse.” The complete post on IBM and Torque is here…