The ARCH

Please Subscribe to the New Location!

2007-01-16T09:31:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder to subscribe or switch links to the new location of this blog: http://www.archvirtual.com

Thanks!
Keystone

The Arch has Moved!

2006-12-03T16:50:00.000-08:00

The Arch is moving to a new location.
http://archsl.wordpress.com/

Please update your feeds!

Autodesk in Second Life

2006-12-03T11:57:00.000-08:00

I just returned from Las Vegas, after having the honor of closing Autodesk CEO Carl Bass' keynote presentation with a Second Life tour of our Crescendo Design Virtual Studio in front of 6,500+ attendees. The presentation concluded with 2 separate live feeds from Second Life, whereby Mr. Bass' avatar joined joined Jon's avatar, Keystone Bouchard for a tour of the studio.

I have also had the unique privilege to be working for Clear Ink as they develop Autodesk's Second Life presence in preparation for this demonstration. During the past few weeks, I have been working with a team of incredibly talented people to determine what this project should consist of.

Our goal was to create a space that would highlight the community, social and collaborative features of Second Life, as well as to encourage visitors to begin exploring the world for themselves. As a result, the architecture of Autodesk Island became more of a backdrop or space instead of a strong central icon. The main greeting area is not a heroic corporate building, but is instead an open air forum; designed to foster and encourage interaction between avatars. The forum is surrounded by kiosks that provide tools, tips and tricks to help get people started, as well as a diverse list of landmarks to both mainland and island destinations.

Aloha Avatars, a service designed to help newbie avatars make a comfortable transition into SL, led by TROI TimTam, kept us on task with retaining the 'Second Life Spirit' throughout the island. A strong connection with landscape elements, the water, and lots of other features help create a familiar and comfortable atmosphere. As Autodesk's program elements began settling into the island's landscape, the relaxed and inviting sense of place remained.

One of the concepts we explored (interpreted, designed and built by Scope Cleaver), was to express both a grounded, representational component of block steel and glass, juxtaposed against a light, airy, flowing virtual element we called the aurora spires. The idea was to provide a comfortable and familiar point of departure, which embraces an element clearly defiant of real world physics; indicative of the limitless potential of a virtual environment. However abstract and steep in theory the end result may be, it was my hope that it would read as an invitation for an eventual transition into a new language of virtual architecture - liberated from exclusively representational iconography.

As Chip Poutine reported in 3pointD, Clear Ink's Kiwini Oe was able to develop a DWF import tool that allows 2D CAD drawings to be dynamically updated through Autodesk's Freewheel, directly in Second Life. Also on display is Adrian Herbez's Maya import tool, which allows models to be built using a prim-based plug-in for Maya, and imported into Second Life. These features of Autodesk's demo area represent a taste of things to come, as we continue to develop ways to make Second Life a more fluid and automatic tool for professional use.

The island is currently only open to Autodesk University attendees, but we expect to open the island to the public sometime after the conference.

Second Life Foundations: A Primer for new Architects and Builders

2006-11-27T15:09:00.000-08:00

Virtual Suburbia and The Arch will be co-hosting an informal gathering, to welcome new architects to Second Life, and to bring people who love architecture together.

Chip Poutine, Keystone Bouchard and invited guests will be providing helpful tools, tips, contacts, resources and demonstrations to architects who are just getting started in Second Life.

Tuesday, December 5th
7:00 pm Pacific

Tinta Verde 153, 68

On the Move

2006-11-25T19:34:00.001-08:00

I sincerely apologize for the delay in entries. We just completed our cross-country move from Wisconsin to California to begin working exclusively within Second Life. I am now working in Berkeley for Clear Ink on some exciting architecture-related SL projects, and will be happy to share more of the story once I'm settled in.

In the meantime, I have gathered some exciting leads on stories related to how the metaverse is augmenting RL Architecture, as well as the stories of some new architects entering the SL scene who are in the process of building their RL projects and bringing in clients.

Stay tuned!

Prim, What Do You Want to Be?

2006-10-30T10:27:00.000-08:00

Some predictions via BIMania HERE caught my eye this morning. I'm still trying to digest their meaning, but I think Miguel touches on some interesting points, pertinent to the concentration of this blog:

"there will be an ever growing demand on digital designers... If architects don't do it, somebody else will."

"architecture itself could become inadequate for computers."

This reminded me of a conversation we had at the Society for Virtual Architecture last week:

Keystone: Maybe virtual architects should evoke Louis Kahn and ask the prim, "Prim, what do you want to be?"

Scope Cleaver: "More than you'll ever be."

Architect Writes Science Fiction about VR in Professional Pracitce - via Gwyneth Llewelyn

2006-10-20T12:49:00.000-07:00

THIS STORY provides an interesting glimpse into an architect's perception of how the future will transform the practice of architecture. I think the dates he predicts are a bit distant though. He suggests that his fictitious firm started using virtual reality in 2014. I predict hundreds of firms will be using some form of it by the end of 2008.

Virtual Mies: Farnsworth House in Second Life (via Content Confessional)

2006-10-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

Built by: Maximilian Milosz
To see the house click: Farnsworth House at Amicitia (220, 220)

Via Content Confessional

Oblivion and Half Life: Importing Models, by Digitally Distributed Environments

2006-10-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

THESE PEOPLE are doing some very important work. I think they're admittedly on a steep learning curve, but they're ascending rapidly, and are definitely making me dream about the possibilities.

Architecture in Virtual Worlds: A Panel Discussion

2006-10-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

I was sitting on the edge of my seat throughout the entire video posted here: State of Play III : Scroll to Architecture in Virtual Worlds
via Kanker Greenacre [today: 17:51]

Why are comprehensive symposiums with discussions about virtual architecture happening at law schools (4 years in a row), and not at architecture schools? If there have been, please send links to video/blog!

"State of Play III: Social Revolutions was the third annual State of Play conference on the future of cyberspace convened by the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School."

Background Part 2: Virtual Studio

2006-10-14T18:53:00.001-07:00

This is an animation of our virtual studio in Plush Rho, which essentially serve as our 3D website and general meeting space. We tried to make the studio itself into a living diagram of sustainability by including a living roof system, passive strategies, pellet stove, rainwater harvest, rain gardens, wind energy, photovoltaic panels and more. The building is populated with descriptive icons that, when clicked, send you an infoCard with more information about that strategy.

I rented this commercial land, separate from our model neighborhood, back when I was thinking of selling SL prefabs, out of respect for the residential zoning of our other neighborhood. The neighborhood site is far more private, with very few visits from non-client SL residents. However, once I abandoned my commercial endeavors, I decided to keep this location, simply because it generated quite a bit of conversation and interest from incidental traffic within the SL community - which I love. I have learned to never underestimate the power of the social and networking opportunities hidden in every chance encounter.

If you know of anyone building or planning to build a virtual studio for their RL office, let me know!

aloft: Raising the Bar

2006-10-13T18:28:00.000-07:00

Starwood's new virtual aloft hotel is quite possibly the most comprehensive blend of RL architecture and Second Life the metaverse has seen to-date. While this project has been widely covered throughout the blogosphere, it represents a nearly perfect manifestation of the purpose of this blog. Built by Electric Sheep Company, the aloft project raises the bar for Second Life projects built from RL blueprints.

Everything you could ever want to know about this project is posted HERE

RL Architects in Second Life Group

2006-10-12T20:36:00.000-07:00

For those of you who recently joined the RL Architects in Second Life group, welcome! I sincerely hope this will become a worthwhile and productive group. There are so many opportunities and challenges in this particular niche, it seems a timely and worthwhile effort to begin discussing what works, what doesn't work, and what tools we need to make our work more efficient.

I think we all agree that a virtual platform has the potential to transform our industry. Most architects already spend a great deal of time working in 3D environments, and are constantly walking the line between the real and imagined. The emergence of a seamless and dynamic virtual platform, bridging the gap between real and virtual would be profound.

However, there are definitely roadblocks that prevent most RL Architects from joining in full force. I hope this blog will encourage an important dialogue and become a part of the force that derides those challenges.

Surely we're in the midst of a natural evolution, whereby a few early adaptors will begin fighting their way through the current limitations to get in on the ground floor. First and foremost, I would like to blog all about those early adaptors, and share their stories.

A step beyond this are those who have not yet engaged SL as a professional tool, but are on the sidelines waiting for the technology to evolve before taking the leap. Some of the most inspiring conversations I've had are with these architects who are lurking behind the scenes in SL, watching and waiting. I'd like to find out why they're not using SL professionally yet, and what changes need to take place before they'll jump in.

Then there are the futurists, or metaverse evanaglists. Architecturally trained or not, there are lots of people who 'get it', and have visionary ideas about how the real and the virtual will come together for architecture. I want to blog about their ideas, and ask everyone in this group to share their vision for how virtual reality will evolve during the next decade and beyond.

Architects who quit their day job to build in SL exclusively? Why did you decide to make this shift? Do you plan on rejoining RL architecture once SL can more effectively support it? There are a curiously high percentage of architects in SL who have gone this route. If you're one of these people, and wouldn't mind sharing your story, I'd like to write about it.

In all, I think we're on a pretty steep collective learning curve, and I hope this blog will help bring together a meaningful dialogue to help us understand where we are now, and where we want to be. Eventually I would like to see this group/blog host in-world events, podcasts, seminars, forums, classes, outreach programs, competitions and more. I welcome anyone's ideas as to content, events or any directions we should be exploring. Please email me at jbrouchoud@lakefield.net, or IM me in-world, Keystone Bouchard, to share your ideas, or just say hello!

Versu Richelieu's 72 hour build!

2006-10-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Versu will be building, sleeping and living SL for 72 hours straight during this demonstration of the Intel Core 2 Duo processors from a live window on 5th Avenue in New York City. Check out the live feed HERE.

Why cover this event here? Because she has decided to recreate the architecture, context and streetscape of her physical surroundings within the NYC storefront. This establishes a truly compelling synchronicity between SL and RL, since the bystanders watching her from the RL storefront can recognize the virtual replica, and can see the SL bystanders, and vice versa. On a number of occasions, they were interacting with each other, smiling, waving, and blowing kisses.

By watching the two simulcasting live feeds from both RL and SL, you could plainly see the differences between these two states of 'reality'. On the one hand, I overheard lots of buzz amongst SL residents wishing they could be in New York City to see the physical installation in person. Some even talked about taking a day trip tomorrow to see it for themselves. However, many of the RL spectators seemed to be staring in awe at the uniqueness of total freedom in the virtual world. After all, the virtual spectators could fly around and soar to the top of the building, whereas the RL visitors had gravity to deal with. The virtual guests also seemed to be having quite a bit more fun, as the streetscape errupted into uninhibited dancing and celebration as the virtual sun set last night. People from around the world were able to stand beside Versu, and cheer her on.

Although unverified, it seems as though the RL Versu was moving her setup around the storefront throughout the morning, in an attempt to avoid the direct uncontrolled sunlight entering the space; an interesting counterpoint to her virtual location, which remained unchanged, save the occasional escape needed to reach the outer limits of her build.

In all, this installation really made me think. How could real time synchronicity between real and virtual be useful from an architectural standpoint? Since architects must operate seamlessly between the virtual worlds of design visualization, while remaining firmly planted in reality, surely there are ways in which a real time portal between these worlds would be useful.

Meet Vittorio Barbarino - RL Italian Architect

2006-10-12T08:18:00.001-07:00

Vittorio has merged his real life architecture practice with Second Life, and has also started building SL-specific content as well. Check out his RL studio HERE

Check out his Virtual Studio HERE

My Very First Machinima: Virtual Tour of the Crescendo Design Neighborhood

2006-10-11T20:22:00.001-07:00

Here is a quick sample video of our virtual neighborhood. This is just a test, and will hopefully be followed by many more educational videos describing the benefits of sustainable design.

Author's Background: Crescendo Design, Using SL as Professional Tool

2006-10-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

I am the co-founder and partner of Crescendo Design, a multi-disciplinary design studio with a specialty in sustainable design. We take on a fairly wide variety of different assignments types, but have been focusing most recently on designing ‘green’ or environmentally friendly houses. We’ve been using Second Life for about 3 months now, and have found it to be a pretty amazing tool, not only for creating quick study models, and virtual tours, but for networking and collaboration as well.

I think Second Life had an immediate appeal to us for 2 main reasons. First of all, our home studio is on a nature reserve, on Lake Michigan – totally isolated from everything. Even the nearest small town is a 20 minute drive. However, our projects are scattered across the state of Wisconsin and is starting to spread throughout the Midwest. The potential to communicate with clients in a real-time dynamic way, and actually have meetings inside of our design ideas seemed a dream come true.

The other reason I think Second Life appealed to us was because of our emphasis on illustration and education as a critical component of our work. Because public awareness of sustainable, or green design – especially in the residential market, is still generally lagging, education has always been a critical component of our work. In order to describe the value of green design to our clients, education becomes important throughout our entire process. Also, the concepts we’re presenting aren’t always exactly common practice, its important that we carefully describe our ideas, in simple and easy to understand ways.

When we suggest a restored prairie, a living roof, photovoltaics, wind turbines, or passive solar, we’re always depending on crystal clear illustration to prove that its not going to look weird, or in the case of a living roof, to actually show them how the system is assembled, and how it will look on their home.

So given the amount of time we spend modeling and illustrating - within a few days of experimenting in Second Life, I recognized its potential to become, at the very least, a way to make quick study models for us. It definitely wasn’t going to replace Architectural Desktop or 3D Studio, but it could replace our cardboard study models. The building tools in Second Life are extremely simple, and are based on a series of Primitive objects, or prims. Everything in Second life is made up of linked prims. So, in a few minutes of experimenting, I could make a simple model of project we had recently completed in Madison.

Of course, it was all too tempting to test the boundaries of the sandbox, and build an entire neighborhood of this house. And this still being within my first couple of days in Second Life – seeing how easy it was to create this neighborhood was pretty interesting. But the surprise was how amazing it was to just sit and observe random people just walk around inside the houses and drive motorcycles down the street was pretty amazing. There are certain designated places where you can build as much stuff as you want – called Sandboxes. Some are Mature, some are PG – this particular Sandbox was mature, but in the days I was working there, I hadn’t witnessed anything ‘mature’ about it. But, when you build something like this in a sandbox, you’re just about guaranteed to be immediately engaged in an almost constant stream of feedback from people passing by. I’ve had some of the most amazing conversations with strangers – some of whom immediately understand what I was trying to do, and wanted to know more, or give me advice, or show me their own house. In these public sandboxes, there’s never a dull moment.

The next step was to actually map textures of the floorplans onto the surface of primitive objects, in order to provide some sort of true scale base to build upon. Keep in mind, there is no way to import DWG into Second Life – yet. Because inhabitants are free to write scripts to do just about anything imaginable, there have been several attempts at making an import tool, some more successful than others, but none of them have ever remained stable for very long. So, for now, this sort of texture mapping was the only way to build anything accurately.

So, within a few hours, I was able to piece together a very crude model of a house we had just finished construction drawings on that was just about to be breaking ground in a few weeks. SLIDE I felt that these clients were fairly open minded, and I thought they might appreciate something like this. So, we invited them into Second Life for a virtual tour.

The very instant the client teleported to our construction site, a completely nude character runs up to her, and started blocking her from getting into the house, and doing all sorts of things that left nothing to the imagination. However, I reported harassment, and a little white bunny rabbit police officer with a big gold badge appeared who quickly detained our intruder and allowed us to continue the tour unmolested. He later informed me, however, that I was building this house in a mature sandbox, and she had every right to be naked here. I immediately recognized the value of the private land ownership system, and we don’t build in mature sandboxes anymore.

Later that night, I discovered that the Society for Virtual Architecture was holding their weekly meeting. The topic of conversation was, “Should Virtual Nature be Preserved?” Which actually turned out to be a very enlightening conversation! This was a very real issue that was hotly debated. As the meeting came to a close, I shared my story of the tour, and several people teleported in to see the house for themselves. I was amazed at the number of professionals, architects and engineers alike, who were suddenly climbing all over the home, on the roof, in the basement, shouting out ideas about how to improve its construction. It was really a unique experience. I mention this aspect of my experience because this networking and feedback aspect of Second Life might be among the most significant reasons why I kept coming back. When you meet these people, you have an immediate connection every time you log on – and instant messaging quickly become a very dynamic means of collaborating and gathering information, and sharing ideas.

Somewhere around this time I met Chip Poutine, author of Virtual Suburbia, which chronicles the various architectural projects within second life. He decided to write about our story – calling the entry ‘Little House on the Sandbox’. This article brought thousands of hits to our website, more than double what any other link has ever brought in 3 years. This traffic brought with it a whole wave of new contacts with professionals from all over the world who wanted to know more about what we were doing.

I also had the opportunity to meet Second Life Business Magazine's publisher Hunter Glass, who offered to write a feature article, called the 'Greening of SL'.

Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life also featured Crescendo in their monthly newsletter Second Opinion. Keep in mind that all of this happened within my first few weeks of experimenting with Second Life, and all of these opportunities brought about a whole new network of contacts with people who wanted to collaborate on various projects, or actually hire Crescendo to design and build various specialized projects, from grade school education islands to someone who’s reconstructing a huge aircraft carrier, and much more. This amazing network, and the almost immediate virtual press coverage that emerged in just a few weeks of being in Second Life was a powerful bi-product of building there that came as a real surprise.

Somewhere around this time, we built a more formal meeting and collaboration space we call our Virtual Studio. It helped us bridge the gap between Real Life and Second Life by really putting our name Crescendo Design out there in the virtual world.

Up until then we had kept a certain layer of anonymity – mostly out of habit, in most roll playing, or game-like environments, its often standard practice to keep your RL identity a secret – but I couldn’t really figure out a distinction between how we were using Second Life, and how we use our web site. So, the virtual office put our portfolio into this environment.

The model itself became a sort of living diagram of several sustainable concepts. We built it around solar orientation, with a living roof, wind generators, integrated photovoltaics, rainwater harvesting with rain gardens, a strong indoor/outdoor connection, and I joke with visitors that it was built entirely with recycled prims. SLIDE We added some diagram models describing how photovoltaics, wind energy and geothermal systems work. We also included these infoCard dispensers made out of our logo, which provide more information about each of the sustainable principles.

After the studio, we started building models of predesigned concept homes we sell on our website called Springboard Homes. Part of the goal with the Springboard project is to serve a growing number of inquiries for green home design in remote areas of the Midwest, outside of our market area. These concept homes provide a literal Springboard that, at the very least, have solar orientation, reduced footprint, indoor-outdoor connections and green material specifications built-in to make the process of building a healthy home more tangible, instead of just a theoretical idea.

The main idea with the Springboard Homes is that they’re are small, sensible, flexible, affordable homes, intended to act as a starting point, easily customizable to suit the unique characteristics and orientation of a wide variety of building sites, as well as individual stylistic preferences. Ideally, in time we would like to begin offering concepts designed specifically for different geographic regions – responsive not only to their local construction methods, but to the characteristics of their unique regional vernacular cues as well.

Interested buyers now have the option of entering into our virtual neighborhood, and touring the home concepts before they buy. We tried to achieve a diverse range of styles – to really emphasize the flexibility of these concepts, and cater to a broad range of stylistic preferences.

The other function is to actually provide buyers of these concepts with a virtual model of the concept they purchase. The idea is that for each virtual model sold, we would annex another plot of land to the neighborhood. Clients can then literally occupy the home before construction starts, testing out paint colors, wall coverings, furniture arrangements – really anything you want to customize can be accommodated by this model. More tech savvy clients may choose to customize the materials themselves, or they can hire us to do it for them. Given the cost of illustration, and the extraordinary expense of building a house, the ability to literally occupy and totally customize the finishes, and spend as much time doing it as you’d like, before construction starts has a tremendous value – especially in the market of affordable homes. Typically you aren’t given this level of interaction with a mid-level home.

In conclusion, Second Life has proven to be a phenomenal experience for us, and we encourage anyone involved in the architectural or construction industry to explore Second Life.

Welcome!

2006-10-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Welcome! I'm Second Life Architect Keystone Bouchard, (Jon Brouchoud in real life). I intend to focus this blog on my experiences of using Second Life as a professional tool in my architectural practices and beyond. I've only been in SL for about 3 months, but it has been a wild ride, and perhaps a story worth sharing. With my first few posts, I will try to captures some of what I've experienced to-date, with subsequent posts reflecting current events as they unfold.