what is j-wu up to?

to speak of my interest in Second Life, i have many. i have come to enjoy the instant socialization SL presents, and have made many friends, associates, and even a few entertaining rivalries. early on SL provided an amazing model in helping me digest a lot of the readings i was doing on technology, specifically information technology, questions of public space and the challenge of the spaceless network upon spatially bound architecture, the cyborg and post human metaphor, and other topics dealing with politics and agency in the information age. along the way this game economy became a USD economy, and i found my self become fascinated and involved in it, learning a lot about business and entrepreneurialism along the way from my own experiences and those of my friends in SL. and finally, i am one of those that believe SL is a precursor to the 3D interface to the internet, much like HTML provides the basis of 2D support. i feel like the current community of players fiddling around with the SL toolset scripting cars and planes, modelling houses and furniture, or baking avatar clothing for fun to create their fantasy hobby world are tomorrows 3D developers making large sums of money making sims for offline businesses, big and small (very much like the recent Wells Fargo project, which i wasn't at all surprised to learn about).

my favorite example that i give my friends when i show them this hobby of mine is my diverse car collection in SL. the inworld economy for selling these things is great but as this kind of game evolves into a platform or protocol, i ask them to imagine a much more sophisticated model of a fully customizable Ford Mustang in a virtual showroom, with a sales rep logged in world to provide any support you need. you click your colour, your engine, your accessories and you see it in 3D, quite possible with polarized goggles or some gadget for the full effect. you might even take your virtual car for a test drive in a smartly programmed virtual environment before authorizing payment through your paypal account to have the physical analog delivered to you in 5-6 days.

another is of branding cyberspace. this is already happening on the internet at large, and is not recent revelation in virtual worlds either. in my brief time exploring the VWs such as the Sims Online and There i very quickly encountered prominent brands such as McDonald's and Nike. There is no reason why the shopping malls of SL could not one day be selling or giving away these brands for virtual consumption and similarly to my automobile example, also using SL as a venue to sell physical products.

i feel like SL is the at that cutting edge. and as a recent architecture school grad, i can see even more immediately practical applications of this environment that i've experienced first hand. the SL toolset is incredibly primitive in relation to the modelling and drafting programs i'm accustomed to, but it has some advantages as well. the first is the immersive experience the avatar provides for which i am still trying to articulate why it is so compelling and the second is the shared space SL provides.

although the architects contemporary practice is a virtual one, one of conceiving of a vision, and then providing images to communicate it to others, and not of actually building, CAD software is bringing architects closer and closer to reasserting control over every minute detail of a project, much like the master builders of a former age. sl provides a different twist, not yet capable of the kind of detail other toolsets provide. the avatar becomes a human reference to the design, constantly walking, climbing, falling, jumping, and bumping in, out, through, over, under, and around the interventions we place in the virtual world. whether this immersion is providing a step away from virtuality and towards the embodied, or if it is a deeper layer of virtuality is something i am still reflecting on and trying to get a grip on. i wonder whther this sense of embodiment serve as something generative of degenerative to a critical design process. i plan to make a serious RL linked experiment with this idea with the firt possible opportunity to explore this idea further.

the sharedness of the SL environment is also very liberating to me relative to other CAD mediums. when i make a physical model or drawing, my colleagues can simply manipulate the same model with me or draw right on top of my drawing. in CAD it is the struggle of who is in control of the pointer and keyboard. it is a very awkward situation. in SL, the sharedness returns. a colleague can log in and start manipulating the same object or adding to it. they can tear away a copy immediately to make a divergent iteration. at this point, the SL toolset is probably too primitive to truly be able to draw the ideas of major architecture projects beyond the most early conceptual ones, but nevertheless, that possiblity is apparent to me, as i have experienced it in the back and forths between many of my SL friends while we build, and particularly on a recent project i completed with nicola escher.

this is what i see in SL. these are the reasons i'm so passionate about this game. this should give an idea of the kinds of discussions i want to engender with this blog :)