Come Visit The Apartment
Many of my favorites combine into one moment here: MellaniuM, Skribe Productions, and Nortel’s web.alive.
Visit The Apartment here. It’s very light on the system resources but takes a few minutes to download the assets. We’re talking about a full-sized apartment building translated directly from CAD in full detail.
I was extremely impressed with the web.alive platform after seeing it at work for Levono’s eLounge, so when the news came a few days ago that MellaniuM had moved their apartment complex build there I had to see it for myself.
This is another example of virtual worlds being used in architecture, but up until now I really do think the wrong tools have been applied to the problem. Don’t get me wrong: the hospitals and hotels built in Second Life as proofs of concepts were great and worthwhile. Tangible return on investment in the form of fast prototyping, where designers could solicit large amounts of feedback from a wide range of users, definitely served to improve those projects.
At the same time, though, Second Life as a platform made this pretty tough. Buildings are big complex things and rendering them faithfully means using a reasonable amount of detail. There are a number of other platforms where demos can be run much more smoothly. In this case, for example, the content can be translated directly from CAD, and gets loaded before I enter (instead of on the fly). Your trade-off for better detail and a smoother tour is a longer initial load time, but depending on your setup, that might be worth it.
Here’s a video demonstrating the difference in flythroughs of the Theatre of Pompey and the Titanic:
Second Life is the superior choice for many other applications, but for architecture I think we have a winner here. Hopefully others will follow MellaniuM’s lead and we’ll see virtual worlds employed much more widely in the industry. The fast prototyping of buildings, or at the very least a pre-build walkthrough in a 3D space, saves so much time and is so useful as a marketing tool I can imagine a time where it’s assumed every building project will have one.
February 27th, 2009 at 11:06 am
This is definetely a step forward. I asked on Clever Zebra if this can be expanded to master plans for a island or region. Is is possible or not just yet? Thanks.
February 27th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
[...] Caleb Booker pointed out in a recent post: “the hospitals and hotels built in Second Life as proofs of concepts were great and [...]
March 5th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
[...] Caleb Booker pointed out in a recent post: “the hospitals and hotels built in Second Life as proofs of concepts were great and [...]