During President Obama’s historic speech at Cairo University in Egypt last June, he describe a vision to, “invest in online learning for teachers and children around the world; and create a new online network, so a young person in Kansas can communicate instantly with a young person in Cairo.”

If you’ve spent any time in a virtual world at all, you know that the ‘online network’ Obama described doesn’t need to be created, it already exists.  Students don’t merely use it to ‘communicate,’ as they would in a phone call or …

$900 million facility prototyped in Second Life now under construction

Brendon Bilavio took to Second Life like a fish in water – somewhat literally. Let me explain..

Almost exactly a year ago today, I published a post celebrating realxtend’s ability to enable 3D mesh imports – a post that remains the most popular on this site.  Realxtend since took a deep dive into its code base, developing a custom viewer from scratch, and making significant strides in improving its platform overall.  Now it seems I’m hearing about realxtend everywhere I look.
Recently, a post on maxping caught my attention, describing a new ‘School of the Future’ project in Oulu, Finland, developed by Pasi Mattila and Jukka Miettunen.  They have teamed …

This blog is all about discussing architecture and design in virtual worlds – so lets discuss it!

Check out this jaw-dropping, computer generated animation by Alex Roman, called “The Third & The Seventh.”  If it weren’t for the ‘making-of’ videos that accompany this piece, I couldn’t possibly have believed this isn’t real video footage (even if it were, it would be equally compelling).  He made this using 3DsMax, Vray, AfterEffects and Premiere on a low budget machine.
Whenever I see things like this, I’m always tempted to cite Moore’s law, and exponential advances in computing hardware, in anticipation of the quality of augmented reality and virtual worlds in the …

Chez Keystone! Come on in…(plugin required).
This isn’t multi-user (yet), and navigation might take some getting used to, but this is an Autodesk Revit ‘as-built’ model of my home, imported into the Unity game development platform I wrote about last week.  If I make a change in Revit and save it, the Unity build dynamically updates. With the exception of the trees, this is pretty much a raw output from Revit without any optimization (which is why it looks so crude). If I spent a few hours on …

There is a lot going on at the University of WA sim in Second Life! I haven’t been able to take it all in yet, but my friend Patch Thibaud teleported me into a site where he recently installed his entry (brilliant, imho – screenshots above and below) in an architecture competition they’re hosting called the ‘Flagship Challenge.’ They’re inviting participants to design the UWA Cultural Precinct Flagship Building, which they plan to build in real life. It will be called FUTURElab, and will showcase the work …

They call it the ‘Open Neighborhood’ project – and it is really a site to see.   This  partnership between the Town of Acton and researching faculty and students from the Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Department at Tufts University is quite visionary, and will be exciting to watch unfold in the months ahead.  They built a replica of an intersection in the Town of Acton called ‘Kelley’s Corner ‘ in order to engage residents and neighbors in the process of establishing a vision and master plan for this intersection.
From the …

Following yesterday’s post about urban models generated from point clouds, I noticed this post on Digital Urban about the possibility of using Microsoft’s Photosynth as a way of capturing these point clouds (in this camporting those clouds as full 3D models. The above video (be sure to watch it through the ‘import’ scene!) demonstrates that concept at a smaller scale, but as Digital Urban observes:
“This opens up the possibility of using photosynth as a free 3D scanner, and one that would work on objects up to the building level …