SL Architecture: quaint, conservative, boring?

Most applications are still updated after they are out of beta. Beta implies that a piece of software is incomplete in implementation of a set of features. SL has a basic feature set which in many cases appears not fully implemented, or at best quite poorly implemented, one simple example is the fact that if you buy an item and then wear it, you often end up with a box-head. I also have a pair of shoes which, if not worn in the right order, crashes the SL client.

For as much as SL is charging premium accounts, they need to hire some better software guys.

An aerosol being. This gives me something to think about.

coco

Many of these issues are results of incomplete product creation to be sure...

But I cannot say that all of them are the fault of Linden Lab.

For example:
Blockhead syndrome is a result of vendors not taking an extra moment to define default application of their packages...
I know one vendor that has the good sense to make her shopping bags attach by default to the right hand... that way you don't end up with "Bag Head". She also bothers to put unload scripts into her packaging. That is true professional packaging.

Linden Lab is responsible for providing us with a platform, but WE are the content creators. If your merchants don't bother taking the time to develop nice packaging, complain to THEM, not LL. I don't think LL is ever going to be able to account for and prevent bad product merchandising.

And before anyone says that we are paying to participate in this platform, I would say: Yes we are... and merchants IRL pay additional taxes and rental fees and other forms of expenditure that are part of the cost of doing business... and yet they STILL manage to have nice packaging.

Maybe I should start a business around nice packaging for merchants to put their stuff in.

NAaaah! It would never fly.

What are the civic spaces in SL that serve as natural gathering places? I'm thinking of the example shown during the SoP Architecture panel of the front steps of the New York Public Library. Random people gather on those steps and engage in random activities (often unrelated to books). Is there anywhere like that in SL? The Welcome Area is one such place, though people would still congregate there even if it were a grass field.

Oddly enought I think one dynamic of SL is scale. LL made height a sliding scale fucntion from 0-100, with no correlation between the scare and rl. As a consequence SL avis are largey over 7 feet tall. This means that a 3 meter celing is very constrained, ans a a practical matter, celigs need to be 5 meters. This changes the proportional Height to width relationship and thus buligs, too look normal, ar ein face much larger. One thing that fascinates me is how different everything in SL would be if the height slider in avi creatioon was expressed in meters with 1.8 meteres being the default.

Observing people in any large space is bound to qualify in SL, especially if there is an original attractant in the first place.

Midnight City is a great example (sorry aimee & mis, i just don't get out much, so your design is all i'm familiar with). The original attractant to get people there are the shops, primarily. Secondarily, people stay because it's a great place to explore, and there are a multitude of places to "hang out".

Failing design, though, people generally tend to go where other people are. I think we've all seen conversations between 3 people eventually turn into dozens as everyone sends TP requests, people fly by, etc.

Once you have people on your land, it's a cascade effect.

LF

a key aspect of public space is accessibility and ownership. for example, currently the jury is still out on shopping malls, and most are not considered public space. most land in SL is owned by private parties, and players can freely ban those whose message they don't like.

Thank you.

While I can understand the need for more flexibility for surrealists to express themselves, "architecture" does connote a sort of alphabet. If you want to create something that is not architecture, then don't use the word -- you'll be limiting yourself.

I agree that it is odd that most avs are so large.
What I would like to know is:
Why does everyone slide the size bar all the way to the left??
Is it American competitiveness? Or is it something else?

IRL, I am 6'6" tall(I believe that that is just 2 meters). My av has been painstakingly modeled after the RL me and the slider has me at a setting somewhere in the 70's. This makes sense to me... I am taller than about 3 out of every 4 people IRL.

When I built my house, I built it "By the numbers" and thought that the numbers would be fine for most folks, and that I could just "Swerve to the outside edge" on the spiral stairs to get upstairs. Kinda like mme ducking IRL. No biggie, right?
Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that taller is better and tallest is best. I have a neighbor inworld that is considerably taller than I am. He cannot make it up my spiral stair because he keeps running into the ceiling before he reaches the opening.

As it turns out, most people never even get the chance to see my eyrie, because they are too tall to get up the stairs and I have not taken the time to change it because I have been busy with other things.

There may be something else at work here, though...

This issue may also be related to something Robin Sojourner (a very wise lady and an SL veteran with a great attitude) shared with me: A lot of people don't have a lot of experience modeling in 3-d, and some of the sliders do not seem to show a lot of effect when you are in "Change appearance" mode, so they crank the sliders as far as they can, just to be able to SEE a difference. Apparently, this is especially true with the male avs. and even moreso when skins are applied, since the markings on a lot of skins make it hard to see subtle changes in proportion.

Another aspect to consider, along the lines of avatar heights, when designing architecture in SL is the ability in SL to view the world from outside your body. When working a real building, you can sort of design the experience for inhabitants with a lot more certainty, because you know they're pretty much all going to have eyes somewhere around 6' from the ground, and they probably won't be hovering near the ceiling. In SL, you can't take that for granted. Both the third person view as well as the ability of flight really changes the way that volumes of space work. That, plus limitations of in-game peripheral vision makes interior spaces especially feel much different from RL.

And I'm amazed how many people waste prims on stairs. If humans were capable of effortless flight, I don't think we'd see many of them.


And being 6'6" only makes you taller than about 3/4 of other people you see? You must live in a neighborhood of giants.

I suspect they'll be derivative of the cultural forms of Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, and various Polynesian cultures - much as space and structure in SL today is derivative of the predominant cultures of the current residents. Form may be different, but among humans, dynamic and process is largely the same. Perhaps virtual worlds will allow people to "travel" to other "countries and cultures", but to me the real question is whether they will allow people to travel "beyond".



I agree that they are placemarkers, but I do not agree that they only "serve to remind us of real world objects". They can, for example, also serve as immersion points for processes and dynamics that do not exist in the real world - something that is rare in SL.



Good point, but Greg Bear in Eon and Legacy observed that even the Geshels had not left their origins behind entirely. We are constrained by at least one thing, and that is the physical/biological limitations of our brain/mind functions. We cannot be a swarm of sentient, far-flung particles because of structural and functional limitations, although we can learn to mimic such an intelligence, and in the process, learn much from it. So all this talk about "surrealism" and "disturbing fantasy" and fearfully unimaginative what-not is a contradiction of terms; whatever we might build in a Second Life completely liberated from "physical reality" will still be human in terms of the most critical perspective of all - the human minds that shape it. And that will be the bungee cord that saves you when you leap off into the abyss.

Hahaha... omg.... that's so discriminating @_@

(I KEED! I KEED!)

I think we have to wait for Havoc 3 before we get decent bungee cords.

I like boxes!

I don't need a bungee cord.

Buffalo NY...
A lot of Ukrainians here... and Germans, Poles and other forms of tall folk making up the gene pool.
And I did not include in my numbers the people that were about as tall as me (+/- an inch or so), nor those taller (Quite a few more than I am used to! I came from other parts of the country wehere >I< was considered the giant.)

Me: I'm a Tuscan/Kraut liberally mixed with Swede, Mountain Welsh and Polish.

haha! That's an awfully cute cafe, though.

coco