Management

Virtual Futures for Design, Construction & Procurement

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Architects and other designers inhabit a curious borderland between the virtual and the
physical. They have always been concerned with conjuring up things that don’t exist
but might, imagining them in detail, and eventually finding ways to translate these
visions into physical reality. Over the last half-century, computer-generated virtual
worlds have played an increasingly crucial role in this process.
The first virtual world I ever saw was called Spacewar. It ran on earlyDECcomputers
in the 1960s and 1970s, and was later reincarnated as one of the first arcade games – more
accurately, a bar game, since there weren’t yet any arcades.ASpacewar ‘world’had two
inhabitants. You controlled one spaceship moving in the gravitational field of a star,
your opponent controlled another and you tried to shoot each otherdownwith missiles.
It was very simple – limited, of course, by the available processing power and graphic
display capabilities – but it had the essentials: a simulated spatial environment, simulated
physics, control of something that represented you and multiplayer interaction.
Four decades later, we have entered the era of Second Life – which, when I last
logged on to check, claimed to have 4 523 218 residents. Second Life describes itself as
‘a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents’. It runs over
the internet, and its operators just keep adding servers as it grows. It presents itself in
coloured, shaded perspective, with real-time motion. Players control avatars that can
interact via text messages, buy and sell virtual artefacts, acquire virtual real estate and
design and build virtual things. Numerous organizations, such as the Reuters news
agency, have built sites in Second Life to transact business there.

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Series Title

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Call Number

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Publisher

: ., 2008

Collation

1-334

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

978-1-4051-7024-6

Classification

NONE

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