Well this is cool. State of Play announced a virtual architecture competition a few weeks back with the theme “public space” (or something of that nature). I considered entering something on which I’ve been working, a virtual learning space, but after researching the backgrounds of the judges I decided to concentrate on seeing my project through instead of doing something to match their expectations. And I’m glad I did because as it turns out, I’m part of the winning team anyway (this is where I post “woot!”.). Unbeknownst to me, Randal Moss of the American Cancer Society (here’s a pic of him in action) entered the virtual charity event SL Relay for Life (here’s a pdf of his entry) and I happened to contribute to that effort by designing and building the architecture around the opening ceremony stage (over three days with the encouragement of virtual residents Candy Fox and Punkie Hatfield, watching the activities with me in this pic). The image below was taken just after the charity ended and you can see all the entries on the State of Play website here. Good news for the weekend.

Clickable Culture brings word of something I’ve been expecting for a while now: a virtual volumetric search engine. For me this isn’t far off from my old RW RadTag concept (I put a lot of thought into the idea of spatial search when doing that little project). And like the comment I posted earlier on the virtual mapping tool, it takes advantage of the ability to employ spatial coordinates in ways not easily accomplished by RW engines like Google. Kudos to the Wet Ikon team.

So what’s next? Well, I suspect someone is going to realize {or already has} that they can take that mapping engine I posted about earlier and not just “carve” something, but collect accurate 3D mesh data similar to a “point cloud” (or better, go straight to a mesh) and export it to be used elsewhere… and then fabricated. I’m aware that people at one time wanted to export their customized avatars to the real world for this reason, but I’m unsure if virtual scanning was raised as a solution; well here’s a way to do it. Just like there are mall-based scanners to digitize people and put them in games or help with fitting clothes, I expect someone will create a virtual scanner that kicks creations out in a clean format (like .stl). Question is, who will do it first?

Then the next question (and it’s a kicker – legal eagles take note) is how long before someone combines the Roam Search and this Scanner (“Search ‘n Scan”?). And when that happens, will we then have the virtual world equivalent of some Chinese manufacturer pirating parts by doing a 3D scan of competitor originals? It’d be the equivalent of opening a catalog, seeing what you like, and then having the information you need to recreate it handed off to you. Yow. I don’t see how we won’t.

There’s been plenty of news lately about car design; especially with the new emphasis on small cars. BusinessWeek is carrying stories on small cars in the pipeline, and on the new retro-Lutz-inspired GTO (I agree that it’s lacking the original spirit). Car Design News is running the same press as almost everyone else covering the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show which looks like a boring show to me. So instead of playing the same worn out record, I thought I’d just take a quick peek at CDN’s portfolio pages. Heck, the second one I look at has something more interesting than the stuff I see getting all the press.

The above image is a concept by transportation design student Julien Debomy. Way more fun than the stuff I’ve seen reported lately. I need to pay more attention to what’s going on in the trenches.

{Image Copyright © Julien Debomy}

I’m one of those who winces at the word “Futurist”. It was cool to see a title like “Visual Futurist” up on the screen next to an industrial designer’s name (e.g. Syd Mead), but in general the term – for me – puts pictures of tinfoil-hat-wearing alarmists in my mind’s eye. Not exactly my kind of crowd. And even my association with the SL Future Salon – and by extension the Accelerating Change folks – sometimes gives me pause. Well, the question of legitimacy is raised in this Wired article, and for anyone who visits this blog it might be worth a read. Truth is, I wouldn’t even bother posting this entry except for one sentence in the whole piece:

The APF, for example, had a recent annual meeting in Las Vegas, a venue Hines saw as appropriate for discussing the blurring boundaries between the real and virtual worlds.

Now they’re talking. Maybe I’ll actually pull for them getting some kind of system in place to legitimize the title. Until then though, I’ll probably continue to wince.

I may at times rag on BusinessWeek for spinning design a little too much (and of course I understand there is a business reason behind the spin), but I do enjoy the interviews they post; having given up on ID magazine a few years ago this sort of thing is much appreciated. And today they’ve posted a nice excerpt from an interview with none other than Richard Sapper. Go check it out > link.