In the capital of Canadian province Alberta, CIO Chris Moore is on a mission to recreate his city in the virtual world, where avatars roam and interact like they would in real life.

H-Town, the OpenSim neighborhood previously posted HERE, is now open to the public!  This is a most impressive application of building real-world architecture using the OpenSim platform, and by far the largest expanse of contiguous virtual land dedicated to it, covering 3 full sims featuring 8 full-size replicas of real-world homes they well on the Hometta website.  The H-Town grid, hosted by ReactionGrid, will continuously evolve over time.  They plan to add one new home each month, giving visitors lots of reasons to come back.
This really is an incredible resource …

Here are several before and after images of the ‘Porchdog’ residence, prototyped in Second Life by the Architecture in Virtual Worlds community.  We built a virtual replica of this original design by Marlon Blackwell Architects, which was published to Open Architecture Network under Creative Commons licensing for an event with Architecture for Humanity founder Cameron Sinclair’s appearance in Second Life.

During the presentation, Cameron Sinclair described the project:
“The idea is, can we work collaboratively online, in places like Second Life, to respond to issues like Hurricane Katrina.”
He also described some background …

The headline-grabbing aLoft Hotel project, first prototyped in Second Life before construction started, can now be visited in the real world (and has been open for quite some time now).  Starwood Hotels was the first to take their hotel’s architectural concept into the virtual world via Electric Sheep, and even used the virtual prototype to invite feedback they eventually used to modify the design construction started in real life.

Business Week (among others) covered the project, and had this to say about it,
“For Starwood, opening aloft inSecond Life is a way …

If you have any interest or curiosity whatsoever about using Second Life or any other online, 3D, collaborative virtual environment for architectural prototyping or education, this is a must read success story.
Construction has completed on designs first prototyped in Second Life by students at the University of Austin School of Architecture.  The prototypes were the result of a collaboration between Professor Sergio Palleroni’s students and the students of Dr. Leslie Jarmon’s “Communicating Across the Disciplines” graduate course.   Sadly, Dr. Jarmon, who was responsible for orchestrating the virtual presence …

It happened exactly 1 year, to the day I first contacted Jani Pirkola former project manager of the Realxtend team. I heard rumors late in 2007 that they had goals to accelerate the development of the ‘opensim‘ platform, and one of their priorities was 3D model imports. The conversation continued until a few weeks ago, when I received an e-mail from Jules Vos, founder of Visibuild, a company he founded aimed at leveraging and improving the capabilities of Realxtend, specifically targeting his efforts at architecture and the built environment.
He asked for …

Are browser-based virtual environments the way of the future for virtual design visualization?   Here is a brief overview of 4 of the many emerging platforms or related services to watch, and some thoughts about how they fit into the bigger picture of virtual worlds and architecture.
I’ll start with MellaniuM.  I’ve been following MellaniuM’s work with the Unreal platform for quite a while now, and continue to be impressed,  especially with some of their newest demos using Nortel’s web.alive platform.    In addition to architectural visualization, they offer many additional application …

Thanks to Discord Schism for scripting up this Camera Postition script/HUD for viewing real-scale architecture!  He also left the script open to modify and loaded with lots of variables to try out.  If you sit down, it automatically disables the script – so your camera doesn’t end up inside the chair of the person sitting behind you, etc.  When you stand up, it re-enables itself!
Better still, you could easily have this set up on a client’s account ahead of a tour, so they don’t have to fumble around with inventory …

The AIArchitect online resource for members of the American Institute of Architects recently published an excellent story about architecture in Second Life (read it here).
In it, they talk about the work of Guillermo Vasquez de Velasco, Assoc. AIA, who is the dean of Ball State University’s College of Architecture and Planning.  They also mention the work of my good friend Terry Beaubois, AIA, professor at Montana State University’s Creative Research Lab – (aka Tab Scott in SL) covered previously on The Arch here.
They also covered the work of another friend …

I recently sent out a plea via Twitter (I’m @Keystone) to find a better way to experience real-life scale buildings.  It has long been a frustration of mine (and just about everyone who tries to build rl-scale builds in SL!) that anything built at 1:1 proportions ‘feels’ way too small inside.  The most commonly cited reason for this is that people simply customize their avatars too big.  Now, this is true to a certain extent, but it isn’t the whole problem.  My my av has always been the same height …