On Friday, May 22nd at 11am PDT (18.00 GMT), we will be hosting a discussion on Architecture Island in Second Life, called “The Learning Curve for Architectural Education in Virtual Worlds” as part of this year’s WIAOC 2009 conference this SLurl. (note: if you don’t have an account, click  this link, then click ‘Sign Up’ in the upper right corner.  After you set up your account, you will be automatically teleported to the site where this discussion will be held.)
There has been a sharp rise in the use of virtual …

I’m a big fan of Torley’s tutorials, and see they have been consolidated into a single resource HERE.
Enjoy!

If you’re new to virtual worlds, this QuickStart Guide is a great place to start.

Virtual Project Spaces enable you to explore design on a whole new level. These multi-user, online, collaborative environments offer a unique blend of features that cannot be found in any other application. Just like websites, Project Spaces are hosted on servers, and you (and anyone you invite to join you!) can access these worlds by using a free browser, or ‘viewer’ designed specifically for running 3D environments on your computer.
Project Space hosting works just like web hosting, but there are 3 main decisions to make. What size? …

Here’s what I have in my new machine, built 4/15/09.  Total parts cost = $1,100.52 USD, all ordered from newegg.com So far, I have found it to be ideal for the work I do – a combination of virtual world development, 3D Studio, Revit and Adobe Premiere to edit machinima.   Almost every piece of this machine is at least 4 to 6 times better than my old machine, so it is quite a leap in graphics and speed.  Thanks @LarryBishop for building this for me! 
NZXT TEMPEST Crafted Series CS-NT-TEM-B …

I had a professor in architecture school who taught a ‘Drawing in Architecture’ class, and talked a lot about the importance of sketching.  The basis of his argument was that the process of sketching an architectural form results in the shortest possible conduit from what the eye sees, through the brain, into your hand, onto the paper and back.  The argument follows that this connection is especially important while designing, given that your ideas can be transferred directly to paper without any abstraction impeding its flow.
I’m sure this concept of …

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 …

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 …

This looks very promising! I haven’t had a chance to test it out yet, but I had already imported models into realXtend using the Ogre mesh import, and this looks a whole lot easier than it was the last time I tried!
Read the step by step tutorial on importing a model directly from Google 3D Warehouse into realXtend on Peter Quirk’s blog HERE. Screenshot by Peter Quirk.

Check out this ‘mashup of Google Earth and Second Life creating a collaborative 3D data visualization.’ from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration

“Virtual worlds like Second Life allow users to show information in ways that are very difficult using other mediums”
via Architecture +