Huanying Ni Lai Virtual China!

Great blogpost by John Fortt over on Business 2.0, about how 3D design tools are finding new niches in the rush to develop content for virtual realities, notably Second Life.

Though the SL virtuality has its own building tools, master builders normally prefer using tools like AutoCAD, Maya, and Sketch-Up for offline build creation, then import their builds in a range of compatible XML formats (real master builders do high-prim/dense-mesh models offline, texture and light them, then capture the resulting complex textures, import them to Second Life, and impose them on simpler models -- so use of sophisticated offline build tools is not only germane to 'making things pretty' in Second Life, but in making pretty things perform well in the resource-contended virtuality).

According to Fortt, Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, is psyched on the idea of a possible partnership with Second Life's Linden Labs. Bass says that a great deal of his 3D business is now in 'digital prototyping' -- creating design and usability models of structures, etc. And Second Life is, in many ways, an ideal environment for sharing, evaluating and doing research on these models. Bass says that his fastest-growing customer bases, in India and China, are skipping 2D tools and jumping straight into 3D as a way of meeting perceived coming demand of digital prototyping services.

So the next time I quip that (because everything's so cheap there) Second Life is really "virtual China," I guess I'll remind myself that metaverse development is yet another digital service that can migrate globally to optimize cost.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 12:45 PM  Permalink

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