California High Speed Rail: A Metaverse Vision

The use of machinima for project proposals is an interesting move into the more traditional CAD world. Machinima may lack the highly polished visuals that architects and designers have become used to but it adds in the ability to communicate on a human scale and allows a much stronger ability to 'tell a story'. The movie below details Avatrian's proposal for RailLA.org's call for design ideas to revitalize downtown Los Angeles:



The machinima showcases various concepts, real world implementations and original designs. Avatrian used a virtual world platform in order to implement thier ideas in a manner wherein it can be communicated effectively with 3D content designed and built as needed.

We like it, indeed we presented something similar to Cross Rail in London 5 or so years ago. We may of been a bit ahead of our time on that one as im not sure the guys in suits were ready for a mix of 'Trainz' and virtual worlds. Machinima is starting to knock on the doors of more traditional 3D visualisations.

State of the Metaverse 2008

Gary Hayes of http://www.personalizemedia.com has produced an insightful short film entitled The 'Social Virtual' World's A Stage. The film takes a look at over 50 virtual world systems that currently make up the Metaverse as we know it.

Its interesting to note that amongst the first person style words no one system stands out from the rest. Its been 10 years since we started work in the Metaverse and as we noted in our post Second Life/Web 2.0? Virtual Worlds Circa 1998 Is Where It Was At... not too much has changed in the last decade.

Gary's film is embedded below:



It is also interesting to note that the term Metaverse is coming back into fashion. It become distinctly unfashionable to talk about the Metaverse after the first web bubble burst with the term being replaced by 'Virtual Worlds' or 'Virtual Environments'.

Perhaps web based terms that come into and out of fashion is the subject for a future post - how many people have used the term 'Cyberspace' in recent articles or conversation (?) perhaps 1998 was where it was at after all...