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After my earlier post (reLink<\/a>) where I showed some images of the best in product visualization (both what’s available to the public and what’s in the labs), I thought I’d show the flip side; the relative low end of the scale. I’d considered jumping into There<\/a> or Active Worlds<\/a>, but went with Second Life<\/a> for a number of reasons: a) it routinely gets slammed in the gamer press for low quality graphics, b) objects are often created by people unfamiliar with 3D modeling, and c) unlike other platforms of which I’m aware, the content is user-generated *inside* the virtual world. This isn’t a crit or analysis or anything like that. It’s just an observational post, so pushing the envelope in those ways made sense to me.<\/p>\n In any event, I logged in for a few minutes this morning and went looking around. There are plenty of big objects – houses, cars, airplanes, etc – but I was looking for something more mundane than what I normally associate with those categories. I found the perfect object in short order. For those who don’t know, the above image is a welder. I know this not because I’ve taken metal sculpture classes, but because welders just like that shown above were among my first professional design projects. I once wrote a post here commenting that the world is a box (reLink<\/a>). Coming out of school where I was designing organic objects, that feeling was never more true than when I was given the assignment to design welders.<\/p>\n The above image is obviously of a real welder. The question I’d ask, after reminding people these aren’t representative of the same product model (note the nameplates) would be: is there anything significantly<\/em> different between the low quality, user-created virtual facsimile I’m showing here and the image<\/em> of the real thing? The next question I’ll leave to you.<\/p>\n {Bottom image source: eBay seller “Welding Supplies from IOC”<\/a>}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After my earlier post (reLink) where I showed some images of the best in product visualization (both what’s available to the public and what’s in the labs), I thought I’d show the flip side; the relative low end of the … Continue reading ![\"lincolnelectricRL\"](\"pic\/lincolnelectricRL.jpg\")
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