SL as a "real" tool?

I recently finished a building 101 class in Shockwave; the "set" was on the third floor of my house; I used a textured background and some other tricks to make cropping out the moving image pieces easy. Though the work is tied to the game, it occurred to me how powerful a tool SL is for building out training videos and other interactive media, especially with the new video capture features.

For example, if somebody said, "I want to see a portfolio of your media," could I snap pictures of the Datacenter and submit them? Or if a company said, "we are building a new hire orientation program and would like it to be as interactive as possible," could I take pictures of their facility, render it out in SL as the setting, use scans of their paperwork, supply the corporate intranet addresses in the media, and offer that as an internal training product? Imagine a suit 'n tie guy going through an interactive flowchart of the organization's structure, showing you where to access benefit info and what your options are. Or an interactive session to learn the basics of XML in a really fun setting. Anything.

Just wondering how this would pan out. The avatar customization alone would save me a lot of time photographing and retouching say, myself, in a variety of walking/facing positions (which I've done before). Overall the potential for this kind of work using SL as a real tool to generate art and animated media is pretty amazing. Imagine marketing SL that way ;p

Aside from being careful not to use anything not licensed specifically for the project, like textures and stuff...?

sounds like a fun idea to make work easier. you might want to check the Announcements forum and contact that reporter about interviewing for his emergent gameplay story.

one little thing.....be sure you read your client's NDA carefully before you start importing their paperwork and scans of their stuff into SL where people could see them.