[via Social Synergy Weblog. Thanks Bryan!]

Clickable Culture has a fascinating article about using Second Life and the World Wide Web as a 3D design platform. In this case the designer is creating a “historically based game-like environment”. However, these tools could possibly be used to recreate communities and whole cities, to demonstrate the redesign of public places, for instance. Or , even to give a community, college students, or a design team a sort of “3D wiki” of their community to work with? There are lots of possibilities and potentials here. Perhaps all of the potentials are not currently possible in Second Life as it exists right now. many of them do not seem too far off or out of reach, though.

Here’s some quoted text and images from the Clickable Culture post:

In building the sets and props, I first turned to Google Image Search in order to source textures based on the real-life locations to be depicted (locations I’ve been to in person, I might add). I managed to source an excellent photograph of a suitable historical house that included the entire home from pavement to roof. With substantial manipulation in Photoshop sliced it up into textures. I quickly re-created the house in Second Life using basic primitives and applying the appropriate textures. I isolated the door, window-shutters, and hanging flowers as separate objects so that the house wouldn’t look so flat when seen at an angle. This single house formed the basis of all the houses on the inner-city street.

A row of houses turns into a street

I truncated the house lengthwise for some houses, and shortened it to two stories from three for other houses. I then tinted the door and shutters of the houses to further differentiate the dwellings. I added details such as adjoining awnings and a cobbled sidewalk to my row of houses, which was curved inwards to enhance the sense of perspective. Once the row was tweaked to my satisfaction, I simply copied the entire row, and rotated it 180 degrees to form the other side of the street. I added brick pavement and details such as crates. At the end of the street (which was supposed to be in a besieged town), I added a broken-down cart I’d built over a year ago for my own use, and some animated fire objects available freely in Second Life.

Inner-city concept screen.

Tools like these might also eventually be able to meld with Steve Mann’s WearComp and Eyetap technology concepts.

Steve Mann’sopen source Mediated Reality Toolkit allows a wearer of his Eyetap devices to overlay physical reality with Internet content. Example:

The sign above is overlayed with a web browser when viewed through and “eyetap” device.

So, eventually it may be possible to make a “doorway” to virtual worlds. Or, it might be possible to overlay reality with 3D created virtuality.

I also wonder whether people will eventually want to use these eyetap and Second Life virtual-world-style technologies to start creating personal knowledge bases of both reality and virtual worlds.

We now use the WWW and search tools and “tagging” or personal knowledge base tools, like WebAssistant, del.icio.us, flickr, etc ., to store and taxonomize and map pieces of knowledge and information that we create or find online. Will people also desire to use tools like these to collaboratively store information about virtual worlds, and about an always-on digitized intake of reality itself? My guess is that they will.

My guess is also that peer to peer production and social software will find it’s way into mediated realities and virtual world as well.