The days of sitting in windowless rooms under fluorescent lights for team meetings and conference calls may soon come to an end.

Not long ago, around 45 former and current IBMers gathered on IBM's own private island for a very unusual meeting. It was not the agenda, or the speakers, or the slide presentations that broke new ground. What set this meeting apart was its location.

The 'private island' exists only in the virtual world of Second Life.

Attendees at the meeting were digital avatars, created and controlled by participants who physically live on several different continents.

In this three-dimensional virtual space, geographic distance disappeared, as people met, socialised and exchanged questions and ideas.

The world of Second Life has only now become possible, thanks to stunning advancements in the science and technology of gaming.

Yet while its roots are in the online gaming world, Second Life cannot be called a game.

The 'residents' are not superheroes, looking to accumulate points while trying to rescue the princess. Instead, they are networking, listening to music, building homes and starting businesses - in some cases businesses that make serious real-world money.

Video games aren't simply entertainment anymore. We are seeing video game principles transform the technologies underpinning business, education, medicine and social networking.

If the rate of technological advancement and innovation in videogame software and hardware continues outpacing the PC industry, gaming will become the benchmark for how we expect to interact with the information on our computers.

Since the birth of the computer age, the information technology industry has tried to make the interface between humans and machines as natural as possible. Abstract punch cards gave way to the direct control of the 'green screen' prompt, which in turn gave way to the intuitive point-and-click graphical user interface (folders, icons) that we see today.

There's logic behind this progression; humans instinctively use all their available senses when processing information. The fully immersive environment, pioneered by the gaming industry, is the natural next phase of this evolution.

The technology enabling this has arrived. Without much fanfare, the three 'next generation' game consoles - Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's Wii - are putting supercomputer-scale power in the family room.

That's no exaggeration - PlayStation 3 would have made the list of the world's 500 fastest computers as recently as 2002. These machines give consumers more computing power plugged into their televisions than they have in the PCs sitting on their desks.

That immense power gives game designers the ability to create the remarkably rich and detailed virtual worlds gamers now expect.

But the same chips also render highly accurate real-time three-dimensional images of the inner workings of the human body and hyper-realistic geographic surveys. And it enables increasingly precise 'physics engines' that can accurately simulate the properties and laws of the natural world.

We can create the most accurate possible conditions to virtually test new products and ideas - a capability that used to exist only by using hugely expensive room-size supercomputers.

The gaming industry has also pioneered new ways to collaborate. The massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), World Of Warcraft, regularly has hundreds of thousands of users playing together at any given time (the Chinese version once recorded 650,000 concurrent users.)

Within these online worlds, individuals must form teams, working together to overcome challenges the game throws at them. To be successful requires the kind of teaming skills businesses desperately want their employees to have.

Game console manufacturers are investing huge sums to create online communities around their games. Microsoft, to its credit, has taken this one step further, by putting easy-to-use game development tools in the hands of the users - giving them the ability to create their own games which can be uploaded to its online service.

But despite these advancements, gaming companies - especially game developers - have not fully grasped all the possibilities of their skills and technology.

The industry is still structured along the lines of the entertainment industry - a hit-driven business looking for fresh 'titles' to exploit. But with game development times stretching to three years or more - growing in part because companies are trying to take full advantage of the enormous computing power at their disposal - that seems like an increasingly risky business model.

They should instead embrace the opportunities that exist in our everyday use of computers.

Think about what an immersive, three-dimensional Google or MySpace could look like or a 3D e-mail or personal productivity software application. On the enterprise side, imagine how much more effective supply chain or customer relationship management software would be if it was fully immersive and incorporated real-world scenarios.

We are already seeing experiments around using immersive gaming technology to advance medicine, education and e-commerce.

If gaming developers worked with enterprise IT firms on these challenges, their resources and skills could help redefine the fundamental nature of computing.

In turn, IT firms could borrow a page from the gaming industry, looking beyond pure engineering to bring on board diverse skills like graphic artists, sound designers and storytellers.

New computing applications should not just be architected and engineered, but 'produced' in the same way a game developer produces an overall user experience.

Because there's one thing the gaming industry knows how to produce better than any other: fun.

Look at the crazy smiles of people playing a great next-generation game and you will see a level of intensity and engagement with the product that traditional technology firms can only dream of.

Only the barest outlines of what is possible when games leap beyond the boundaries of entertainment are visible.

But what is increasingly obvious is the technology we think of as a 'game' today bears little resemblance to how we will game tomorrow.

- Bas Fransen is IBM Asia Pacific's vice-president for technology collaboration solutions.