Exploring Second Life and its Potential in Real Life AEC

Lately, I have found that barely a week goes by without some new reference to Second Life, the online virtual reality "alternate" world, in the newspaper. As someone who has never been into online gaming, I must admit to initially being somewhat bemused when I read about people making real money selling goods and services to users in Second Life. I could comprehend people visiting online worlds for entertainment and social networking, but couldn't grasp why anyone would pay real money for virtual land, virtual clothing, virtual accessories, and so on. But this is exactly what is happening. A recent article on Entrepreneur.com explores the many entrepreneurial opportunities the virtual world of Second Life has to offer, and cites several examples of entrepreneurs who are quitting their day jobs to devote themselves full-time to their Second Life businesses, which are proving to be financially viable.

Businesses are also starting to explore the use of Second Life as an alternate medium to make their presence felt and market their real-life products. Many companies such as Toyota, General Motors, Adidas, Reuters, IBM, Dell, Intel, and Microsoft, among others, have already established their presence there, as reported in this recent article: Companies build their brands in `Second Life' virtual world. The real life business opportunities afforded by a medium such as Second Life can be even more compelling for an industry like AEC that deals directly with buildings and physical infrastructure. In my December article on Autodesk University 2006, I briefly described a presentation from the opening general session by Crescendo Design, an architectural firm that had started using Second Life to present its building designs to clients. It was also setting up a virtual office in Second Life for conducting its business. Even Autodesk has established an online community there, and was inviting conference attendees to visit it during Autodesk University.

Given all these amazing and somewhat unbelievable developments surrounding Second Life, I decided to create an account myself and check it out. My experience with it, along with additional research on Second Life from an AEC perspective, is presented in this AECbytes "Building the Future" article.

The Second Life Experience

Second Life is the creation of Linden Lab, a privately held company based in San Francisco. It was launched in 2003, but took a few years to gain popularity. Users can sign up for free to establish an account. After installing a downloadable client program, you can access Second Life and select an "avatar" to represent your virtual persona. While the initial avatar selection is somewhat limited, its appearance can subsequently be customized by using a tool that allows editing of different body parts and items of clothing, allowing potentially infinite variations of avatars for representing different people. A single user can have multiple avatars by creating multiple accounts in Second Life. In addition to the appearance, you can also select a name for your avatar. Second Life gives you a selected list of last names to choose from; the first name, however, is fully open to the user. The real-world identity of an avatar remains hidden unless the user has chosen to make that information public, in which case it can be viewed in the avatar's profile. For the purpose of exploring Second Life and researching this article, I registered on Second Life and assumed the basic avatar named "Lata Nishi" shown in Figure 1. The location shown is the Reuters Atrium, to which I "teleported" using the SLurl (Second Life URL) listed on Reuter's Second Life website.

While the graphics in Second Life are still quite rudimentary and do not convey a very real-world feel, I found the overall technology very sophisticated. As an avatar, you can choose to walk or fly to get around, and can also instantaneously teleport to a specific location by searching for it or clicking it on a map. For instance, I was aware from my research that there was an "Architecture Island" established in Second Life, and I was able to find and move to that location (shown in Figure 6 later on in this article) through the Search interface. A mini-map showing the area around you can be displayed in the regular 3D view, as shown in Figure 1; you can also choose to see a bigger screen-size map showing a larger area. When moving, the interface is smart enough to detect matter, so that your avatar cannot, for example, walk through walls. The interface also has understanding of terrain, steps, and so on, to accurately simulate the experience of climbing up a flight of stairs or walking down a hill. Communication in Second Life is through local chat with the surrounding avatars, with three choices based on the range of audibility: whisper, talk, or shout. It is also possible to have private conversations with other avatars through instant messaging (IM)—this does not require the avatars to be within a certain distance of each other. Integrated voice capabilities are expected to be launched in Second Life by June, according to a new report by Reuters, which has assigned a dedicated journalist to be a bureau chief in Second Life.

The almost seamless online navigation experience in Second Life, enabled just by an Internet connection, is made possible by only displaying objects that are within a certain range. Thus, as you walk or fly around, buildings and terrain in the distance start becoming visible and get more detailed as you approach closer. This visibility range can be modified, based on the user's connection speed and computing power. I found some parts of the world amazingly well detailed, not just physical structures, but also landscaping elements such as trees, foliage, and water. See, for example, the scene in Figure 2, of a location in Second Life designed to simulate Hawaii.

Now comes the part that seems straight out of science fiction, but is actually real—Second Life has its own economy and a currency referred to as Linden Dollars (L$), which has an exchange rate that fluctuates just like real currency. At the time of writing this article, the rate was close to L$266 to US$1.00. Money is required to buy land in Second Life for building, displaying, and storing avatars' virtual creations, as well as hosting events and businesses. The Second Life website displays a running tab of the amount of US$ spent in Second Life in the last 24 hours. As shown in Figure 3, this amount, at the time of writing this article, was a mind-boggling $1,675,827! The running tab also shows other interesting statistics about Second Life such as the total number of residents and the number online at the moment. When I wrote about Second Life in the context of Autodesk University in December, the total number of residents was close to 2 million. With a count of over 4 million now, the population has doubled in the course of just 3 months. With a growth rate like this, it is small wonder that businesses are starting to take Second Life so seriously.

Creating Content in Second Life

Second Life provides a built-in editor for creating a variety of objects ranging from fashion accessories to buildings to spaceships. As shown in Figure 4, the interface allows geometric primitives—called "prims"—to be created and subsequently manipulated by modifying their shape, texture, and other attributes. By linking prims to other prims, more complex objects can be created. The editor also provides dedicated options for creating landscaping elements, as well as for terrain modeling, provided the land belongs to you. For avatars who don't own any land, Second Life provides several "sandbox" areas for them to try out the building capabilities, which is where the image shown in Figure 4 was generated. Second Life also allows "collaborative creation," where the same set of objects can be constructed with several other users, at different times or simultaneously. The building tools are accompanied by a scripting capability with a C/Java-style language, which allows object and avatar behavior to be programmed and controlled.

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Some aspects of the building capabilities within Second Life as quite sophisticated. For example, objects can be imbued with physical properties so they respond to gravity, inertia, propulsion, and wind from the weather system in Second Life. Objects cast shadows and are illuminated by the sun. It is possible to import standard graphic files into Second Life for texturing objects as desired. However, compared to the powerful yet easy-to-use 3D modeling tools that AEC professionals are accustomed to using, the basic modeling interface of Second Life seems quite primitive. It would take a lot longer to model a building design in Second Life compared to SketchUp, form.Z, Revit Architecture, and so on. Second Life does not yet provide any import capabilities for 3D models created in other applications; however, there seems to be some independent activity in this area, as evidenced by this blog posting about a tool for converting SketchUp models to Second Life.

Potential of Second Life in Real Life AEC

The fact that it takes some level of skill and sophistication to create anything but the most basic content in Second Life is what accounts for most of its virtual business and economy. Those who create content retain the rights to that content and can sell them to other residents. Thus, it is hardly surprising to find "Architecture" listed as one of the key businesses in Second Life, and there are digital design companies that have been started just to cater to this demand. For instance, an article referenced earlier on talks about the firm, Millions of Us, which was launched in July 2006 and has created a virtual dealership for Toyota in Second Life as well as executed virtual projects and events for other well-known companies such as General Motors, Sun Microsystems, Warner Bros. Records, Microsoft, 20th Century Fox, and Intel. Another leading company in the business of creating virtual content is Electric Sheep Company, which has executed projects for AOL, Reuters (shown earlier in Figure 1), NBC, and Starwood Hotels. These virtual design services are not inexpensive—the average cost of a project in Second Life for a major company runs in the low six-figure range, and there are recurring costs for hosting events and monthly support as well.

Some of these virtual design services are being used to assist in real-world projects. For example, last year, Electric Sheep Company worked with Starwood Hotels to bring their new "aloft" hotel line into Second Life (see Figure 4). While the real aloft hotels will not be ready until later this year, the Second Life project allowed Starwood to give customers a tangible look at how the hotel was going to be and get their feedback early in their design process. More details about this project and its current status can be seen at http://www.virtualaloft.com/.

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Real life architectural firms are also starting to explore the use of Second Life to enhance their real-world business. In the presentation at Autodesk University, Crescendo Design showed how it uses its virtual land in Second Life to build virtual models of its design concepts and redesigns the virtual site so that it is similar to the actual site. It then lets clients access this virtual model in Second Life and spend as much time in it as they want, get a sense of the design, and provide their feedback. It conducts meetings in virtual "real time" where both the architect and client meet in the form of their respective avatars at the virtual site and tour it together. It also uses its virtual studio as an educational model which describes the value of several green design features. In addition to enhancing its real-world architectural practice, Crescendo Design is starting to compete with digital design firms like Electric Sheep Company and Millions of Us to help companies build virtual architecture in Second Life. In exploring "Architecture Island" in Second Life, I came across the virtual office of Crescendo Design, as shown in Figure 6.

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In addition to being an alternate design and presentation medium for architects, Second Life can also emerge as a useful educational tool. I already found some examples of classic architecture recreated in Second Life—for example, see the model of the Farnsworth House, built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1951 and located in real life near Plano, Illinois. As shown in Figure 7, the model also includes landscaping; in addition, butterflies and sounds are incorporated to create a relaxed and peaceful environment. Additional architectural activity in Second Life is being reported on this blog, The Arch, which is dedicated to exploring the convergence of virtual architecture with real-world architectural practice. It describes other examples of classic works being recreated in Second Life, including Palladio's Villa Venete. One can imagine a whole industry evolving to recreate architectural masterpieces online, which can allow them to be experienced in a far more interactive manner than photographs or videos alone.

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As with any new technology, it is invariably accompanied by a certain amount of hype, and Second Life is no different in that respect. Going by the recent news reports, you would be led to believe that sooner or later, a presence in Second Life would be critical for any business to succeed. But for an industry like AEC that has spent over two decades relying on 2D CAD tools to simply replicate the manual hand-drafting process, making the leap into virtual reality seems like a long shot—after all, we have barely just embarked on the BIM revolution. Also, with no easy way to transfer building models created in real-world practice into the virtual world of Second Life, it seems likely that in most cases, the business of creating virtual architecture in online communities will be taken over by dedicated digital design firms rather than by those dealing with real world design and construction. This might not be seen as a big loss by those who prefer to be working with real buildings rather than virtual ones. Yet, virtual worlds can be a powerful and exciting new medium for design review as well as for collaboration. It would be terrific if the vendors of modeling tools used in AEC can work with the creators of virtual worlds like Second Life to ensure that building models created in professional practice can be seamlessly published in the virtual world, complete with all details and textures. When that happens, Second Life can really take off in AEC.

In any case, Second Life more than deserves credit for being an unparalleled pioneer in the virtual world. It opens up endless possibilities and provides a terrific platform for envisioning and realizing new businesses unimaginable in the past. As a close observer of technology in the AEC world, I was fascinated at what Second Life had to offer, even in its present form. With the rapid advancement of web based technologies, this is merely a glimpse of what is possible in the years ahead.

Other Relevant Links

All about Second Life on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life#Software

Virtual Suburbia blog, devoted to reviewing the Architecture of Second Life: http://virtualsuburbia.blogspot.com/

Some YouTube videos showing the use of Second Life in Architecture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7bXu2ozXo0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KruzH82Z2qQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awNEd-5ngKA

Geoffrey Moore Langdon's Virtual Architectural Association in Second Life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/nantucket/53/35/22 (You will need a Second Life Account to teleport to this location.)

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.