Great news from Studio Wikitecture: the code for Wiki Tree, the groundbreaking, award-winning Wikipedia-meets-3D building architecture tool developed by Keystone Bouchard and Theory Shaw, is now open source, under a BSD license. "It is our hope," writes Keystone, "that the Open Source Wiki Tree 3D project will take on a life of its own, and grow to be something bigger and better than we can currently conceive of." More details for getting the code and helping grow the Wiki Tree dev community here.
Tomorrow at 10am SLT/Pacific, the US State Department is sponsoring a Second Life event bringing together architects in the West and Egypt who all use virtual worlds in their professional work. From Cairo, urban planner and architecture professor Amr Attia (Archi Vita in SL) will join Wikitecture co-founder Jon Brouchoud (Keystone Bouchard in SL) from Wisconsin, professor Judy Cockeram (JudyArx Scribe in SL) from Auckland, and architect David Denton (DB Bailey in SL) from Los Angeles, in a panel on architectural design and international collaboration in virtual worlds." Attia and Denton have worked in SL for the last two years, collaborating on a Egyptian mall that was conceptualized in Second Life. (I plan on writing about that project soon; for now, above, another design by Denton in SL.) The event is partly a response to President Obama's speech in Egypt, where he spoke of creating a "new online network, so a teenager in Kansas can communicate instantly with a teenager in Cairo."
Keystone Bouchard, the architect famed for co-creating the groundbreaking Wikitecture design system in Second Life, is expanding his efforts into OpenSimulator with Architecture Islands, and is opening it up to other designers. Cost: Six sims for $150/month and a $220 setup fee, with full remote desktop access and server control, and perhaps best of all, a save/restore function. What can you build with all that land? Here's some suave machinima from Bouchard, to show you. One of his goals with this OpenSim grid is to create a community of architects and builders in the same immersive space. "Architecture Islands in Second Life spawned Wikitecture, and several other unique innovations and design theories," he notes. "What new innovation can be invented within the context of OpenSim?
As I noted last week, one of the first "Linden Prize" innovation awards deservedly went to Wikitecture, the innovative building platform that uses Second Life to design architecture spaces in a collaborative, "wiki" style. Co-created by real life architect Jon Brouchard (known as Keystone Bouchard in SL), it is in my opinion one of the most powerful real world applications of Second Life. However, that's not to say this makes SL an ideal virtual world platform for architects, at least not yet. In recent months, as it happens, Brouchard has started doing more architecture work in realXtend, the OpenSimulator virtual world, using Visibuild, a new service that enables the importation of 3D StudioMax, SketchUp, and other industry standard 3D authoring files. (Here's his own company site, a great reference for architects interested in virtual world technology for architecture.)
Why the shift to OpenSim? Last week I emailed Jon congrats, and then asked him.
One of the world's most noteworthy architects is known only by the virtual buildings he (or for all we know, she) creates, and the 3D digital image of his avatar. Though few people know who the real person behind Scope Cleaver is, the work he created for Princeton University's island in Second Life is acclaimed throughout the metaverse community. It's quickly gaining attention among people who may have never heard of Second Life, too, because Scope's work was recently featured in a story on SL architecture by New York Times magazine -- and now, in a feature for the latest issue of Architecture Now, a highly regarded series from German publisher Taschen, offering a survey of important architects from around the world. So architecture aficionados reading over, say, Architecture Now's section on Daniel Liebeskind, acclaimed designer of Berlin's Jewish Museum and the architect who'll rebuild New York's World Trade Center, may also find themselves happening upon another architect who, in the strictest sense, doesn't exist.
How did this happen? Scope's terraforming partner Poid Mahovlich put me in touch with Scope, who in turn put me in touch with Architecture Now's author, Philip Jodidio. He saw an item about Scope's Second Life work online somewhere, he explained, and figured out how to get in touch with him.
On Monday I mentioned Visibuild, a new third party software package that imports 3ds Max, Maya and Sketchup files into the OpenSim world RealXtend. I should also note Henshin V, the latest iteration of a platform that converts AutoCAD files for use in Second Life and OpenSim. From the Spanish studio AI Design, by developers known as Asha Eerie and Impalah Shenzhou, Henshin's been in development since 2007. Here's the latest demo video from a few months back. Not having any experience with AutoCAD, I put this question with NWN readers who do: does this look like a viable application for designers and architects who want to use SL/OpenSim as a platform?
You should watch this new demo video from architect Keystone Bouchard, at least until :23, when something fairly amazing happens. That's when he seems to literally take the outline of a real world blueprint he's working on and drag it up into full 3D. This is made possible with Visibuild, a new software package from a company of the same name, designed to convert 3D StudioMax and other industry standard building software into the metaverse -- specifically, into RealXtend, the OpenSim-based world. Here he's created the 3D version in Autodesk's Revit software, and referring to the original blueprints to to model the fireplace and porch," Keystone tells me, "and every time I pulled it down over the model from the sky to check the model for dimensional accuracy, I thought it was an interesting effect." In previous projects (as here) he's matched real world blueprints with their 3D, metaverse-based rendition. But this time, "I didn't have to guesstimate the in-world replica one prim at a time-- this model is exactly as it was in Revit, saving me at least 32 hours of painstaking replication time", he says.
For OpenSim/Second Life-based worlds, this strongly suggests a breakthrough in construction tools. For architects and designers experimenting with virtual worlds as a building tool, this is a powerful innovation. As the RL architect industrial designer known in SL as Chip Poutine puts it, "Most professionals I have talked to cite the inability to import CAD data [into the metaverse] as a non-starter. It's time to get started."
Read more about it on Keystone's blog; but first, he answers a couple more questions from me (how it works, and why it's so important) after the break.
The New York Times magazine is one of the most influential publications in the US, because it's mandatory Sunday reading for the country's most successful designers, executives, and assorted tastemakers, their weekly journal for following the most important trends in arts, politics, and culture. And yesterday, when they opened up the magazine, they found themselves reading about architects with quirky names like Keystone Bouchard, Scope Cleaver, and Designer Dingson. Written by Sam Lubell, author of books on Paris and London architecture and an editor with The Architect's Newspaper, his article, "The Architecture of Second Life", is no half-informed puff piece, but the work of a seasoned writer whose appraisal, "the virtual world is home to designs that can take your breath away", has special weight. Along with the above designers, Insilico and Greenies get a mention, as does Bouchard's Wikitecture, Not Possible IRL, and many others. All these names and places have long been well-known to Residents in Second Life-- and now, I picture artists in Greenwich Village, investors in the Upper East Side, and designers in Chelsea, finally learning about them too. I think this might very well become a transformational moment for Second Life, when it's actively embraced as a development platform for architecture and industrial design.
