Builds of peoples real world locations

Yes it is...and pretty accurate at that. I don't think that replicas are unoriginal or uninspired. Especially if you live in a cool area that a lot of people don't get to visit very often. Places like New Orleans, Times Square, Hollywood Blvd., even places like Westwood or Brentwood...
There are so many places that I miss in CA (lived there for 4 years and been gone for a long time) that I would love to be able to visit them IW. Haight/Ashbury would be cool, Morro Bay, Shell Beach...

Dallas is cool but I go there too often for work...that places makes me want to vomit now.

Destin, FL would be cool...Seaside...

The Space Needle in Seattle...the Arch in St. Louis. St. Louis is a very cool city - lots of old architecture.

Bern, Switzerland would be cool. Dublin, Ireland...I would love to go back there.

How cool would the Vegas Strip be?

Sedona, AZ
Hawaii's Na Pali Coast

How cool would it be to do a virtual hike and campout of the the Appalachian Trail? A virtual all night camp out would be fun!

You know what... I love where I live and would love to share it with other people. And I don't mean my loft, I mean my city, esp my part.

Don't let narrow minded people squash your creativity!

Oh ya. I've actually been kinda surprised dat you dun see many SF landmarks and locations. At least not faithful reproductions. If there were, I'd sure be there. Same with a lot of L.A. locations.

I've seen the Portland build that was mentioned and it sounds exactly like what you're talking about.

My company's recreated the street in front of the Linden Lab offices, a park in San Francisco, Brighton Pier, Stonehenge, the White Cliffs of Dover, the kitchen of the Level Playing Field Institute office, UC Berkeley's Sather Tower, and a bunch of other RL places. But most recently . . . I'm moving in about two weeks, and I made a model of my new cabin, so I could push around models of my furniture to see where it'll fit.

The Portland build sounds like it might be especially interesting because it might be multiple people in a build that contains their SL login places - their homes basically speaking.

So you could decide to meet someone at some spot you pick out in the SL build, then go to the meeting spot and have lunch or whatever.

It might be interesting to incorporate portable computers, wireless broadband, and GPS systems into this mixture.

Oh yeah, digital cameras too. Go a spot in real world, take pictures, upload pictures into SL, position pictures at appropriate places and locations, build to match. Add detail to the build as you go about taking more pictures.

I'll be sure to check out the San Francisco and Berkely builds since I might remember them.

Why there hasn't been a reproduction of Linden Lab done by the staff and used for mixed reality events is quite beyond me. They won't even post pictures of their offices in the facebook group I started in hopes they might let us lowly users see where the madness originates, I mean, where Second Life is made.

Saturday I attended an art show at the South of Market Cultural Center, in San Francisco.. This was modeled in SL after the RL building. They were having a RL art show with about 70 attendees while the director of the show was broadcasting SL over a large screen monitor for the RL visitors to view. Those of us at the SL event were able to display artwork to the RL crowd while the RL director lead his SL avie around the gallery showing them what SL was about. Another avie was logged into SL while at the RL event, and they said he looked pretty much like his avie.

I thought this was very edgy and fun, and it became the headlining story for the next issue of my arts magazine. I can't wait for more things like this to start collab'ing.

Oh Sure. Why don't you just leave the front door open and invite the terrorists in? Everyone knows that al Qaeda uses SL for a training ground. Does LL really want a scale model of its offices available for that sort of thing? Plus, if they did a model of their offices, then we would know all their other secrets, like Phil's BDSM Dungeon, the Wall of Persecution where they keep Chaos' picture and a bunch of darts, the roller coaster in the strium, and where they keep the snacks and free soda pop. Not to mention the kegerator in Robin's office or Torley's collection of women's underwear in his desk drawer.

They can't have sensitive info like that leaking out.

If I had the land I often thought about doing replica of downtown Seattle but I don't know...

The SF builds were sets for machinima we did for the Discovery Network show Beyond Tomorrow a couple years ago, and they're gone now. Likewise, the LPFI kitchen's not inworld now as far as I know -- that was circa 2005 or so. There's still a copy or two of the Sather Tower around. One is probably still standing on the client's parcel in Borrowdale, and there's one at my old parcel in Grindlewald, although it'll be gone soon. The tower hasn't got an entrance or interior -- it was just for exterior screenshots.

I think Trout's onto something with the concern about terrorism. I mean, when I had that model of the street in front of LL, there were avatars running in circles wearing their women's underwear collections, setting the Lindens' cars on fire with a flamethrower, dancing around while belching particles and daring Philip to come out, riding a forklift that was wearing a giant party hat and carrying two enormous bottles of beer on the fork, and cutting the heads off of parking meters while shouting about the next stop being an egg eating contest. Horrible . . . horrible. Imagine what it would have been like if we had opened the sim to the public and someone other than myself and my friends had access to it!

SL or RL?

You sure that wasnt' the Waterhead welcome area, or maybe the Bear infohub?

It would neat to be able to combine computers resources, at the server and the viewer end, so that you could make a model that was really really accurate. Open the kitchen drawers and they'd have individual utensils in them. Open the freezer and pull out some frozen peas. Open the container and the indiividual peas are in their.

That last thought is making me think about the movie the Matrix. When the simulated people got shot in there, did they have realistic internal (now not so internal organs showing? Did they have complete simulations of individual organ systems running in all of them all the time? If you looked at their tissues in a Matrix world microscope, do you see cells?? Did they model fundamental particles and let the result work out according to the laws of physics?

Back to modeling one's surroundings, I'm finding that one continuous image from Google Earth, cut into four pieces, and uploaded into SL, appears perfect when the original four slices are juxtaposed outside of SL but has acquired a blurriness at the edges of each piece. On the borders that touch the blur is enough to spoil what should be a seamless join.

Given the aerial view of the terrain and buildings, building even a vaguely realistic model would be quite a challenge. The shot I was using has a big store's roof in it, fairly blurry, with a lot of heating and air conditioning claptrap on it. Just doing a quick and dirty job of cutting out rectangular areas from the original and putting them on the tops of the simple buildings would be a big pain. Doing a good job of it would be more than I want to think about.

i'v not been but aparently somone has built a replica of the laneways in melbourne, and of course there is ayres rock and sydney opera house on the big pond sims

sorry if they have been posted i didn't read through the whole thread

-Crunch

I had a thought too silly to not pass on: making a to scale model of a city block takes a sim - but what if you turned the model sideways? If it has low rise buildings it would fit on a strip say 20 meters x 256 meters. Use one megaprim turned sideways for the ground and use megaprim sculpties for the rest.

Make some custom animations, flying aids, vehicles and camera controls.

Suezanne, your post about Google Earth reminded me that my company has done a model using it. When we were doing an island for the Strong Angel III Disaster Response Demonstration the organizers wanted a scale model of the site where the demonstration was actually being done irl. One of my artists used Google Earth for the layout and on which to model the roofs of buildings, and then we used photos for the sides of them. Then, when I was at Strong Angel as a participant, my avatar and those of other participants stood around inworld looking at the model while we were logged in from that actual location in San Diego. It was pretty cool.

I like your idea about reorienting a city block.

I guess that depends on where you live.

Theres a replica of the Tech Museum in San Jose, CA. its pretty sad tho. Not the SL construction, but the RL one.

You can build buildings in Google Earth using Sketchup-- google has a goal of making a true virtual earth, so where as SL will be more the surreal, Google Earth can replicate the real.

Anyone know of builds that include the place where the builder logs in to SL from?

what do you mean, Suzanne? i don't quite understand the question.

For instance I am in my office in my house. If I built a replica of my rl house in SL and then replicas of my neighbors' houses and a virtual copy of my rl neighborhood.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm asking about. Life size models of the place the users is located in the real world.

My home, workplace, grocery store, bank, gas station, and post office are located such that I can walk to all them, and do, except the gas station, not much point in that, eh?

A life size model of this block and right across the street where the three different branches of my bank are takes roughly one sim.

One could make a model of just the room one is in but it wouldn't have the same effect. You might be able to get the effect I'm looking for with a build of just your house if you lived in a mansion and actually went all around in the house.

I've considered it, but it would be sort boring. As I said before, though, my mommy would be able to answer yes, though, cuz she logs in from her RL home, an her SL home is based directly on it.

Mari
(WHo suspects her RL neighbors are quite different, though)

In my case my room woudl be a box, the interior of my apartment not very interesting.

The terrain, the ground on this block is darn near flat. There's a depression in the big parking lot, that's about it.

The apartment grounds have big old trees, what' left after the tornado that took down one and the two that Katrina toppled. Still enough to be a challenge to model in recognizable forum. There's a pool, giving the opportunity for water textures and splash scripts, models of lounge chairs, metal mesh tables, coke machine, etc.

There's an insurance office on the corner, a post office across the street, a print shop, drive through bank, abandoned restaurant, a bunch of stores in an somewhat old style shopping center. Plenty of stuff to build, plenty of challenge if wanted to make a failry accurate model.

I wonder if I wrote a grocery list and walked to the model grocery store in SL, and "bought" the stuff on the list, in my mind at least, and walked home, might I have the "oh crud I forgot the aluminum foil" experience in SL- and thus be able to add it to the list before going to the store in real life?