Gather 'Round the Wikitecture Tree: SL architects create true 3D wiki

Second Life is often described as "a 3D wiki", but until now, that's been more an analogy than technically correct.  As SL blogger Dedric Mauriac observes, building in SL doesn't readily come with all of a wiki's strongest features-- chief among them, the ability to collaboratively track, review, and edit changes.

Judging by this video, virtual/real world architects Keystone Bouchard and Theory Shaw of Wikitecture Studio have just filled this gap.  Their "Wikitecture Tree" saves the data of a building project into a leaf on the tree.  Collaborators can then review and critique each, and if they like, create a new version of it-- which then literally becomes, in turn, another leaf sprouting from the original design. To see any of these iterations, you just click on the leaf, and the design rezzes before your eyes. This is the process you see in the video, and in my opinion, it's one of the most potentially revolutionary uses of Second Life I've ever seen. 

With the Wikitecture Tree, Keystone tells me, "There are two platforms, a viewing platform and a building platform.

Iterative steps of a wikitecture design represented by leaves (from Studio Wikitecture's blog)

"Contributors can use the viewing platform to cycle through, vote on and comment on any of the designs.  If they find a design they want to 'edit' or add to, they can 'take' that design over to the build platform or their own land and work on it.  When they're done, they submit it to the tree and a new branch/leaf iteration rezzes from the leaf they started with.  Once the iteration leaf is submitted, it is accessible by the other contributors and subject to the voting and commenting process."

The groundbreaking aspect should be obvious: in this way, collaborators can not only comment and expand on each other's works, they can also track the evolution of a project, and if need be, return to an earlier point in the development process.  Architecture is the immediately obvious application, but it's easy to see how this could be used in industrial design, the arts, basically any project enhanced by 3D modeling.

"The interface is a bit complex," Keystone allows, "and will take some getting used to-- but then again, so were the first few releases of AutoCAD!"

Undaunted by that, Keystone and Theory plan to use the technology in a collaborative project to build a prototype design for a medical facility and technology center intended for a village in Nepal.  As it happens, the first meetings for that project happen today, at 9am and 6:30pm SLT/PST.  Details on attending here.

Comments

[Impalah Shenzhou]

Very interesting but not only for Architecture.

Is like the Version Systems used by (almost) every programmer. It has root(s), branches, you can return to previous versions, start new branches...

This could be good for storing any kind of information... but in SL we are limited to notecards and textures...

Great idea Keystone and Theory :-)