Welcome

Greetings all,

After recently completing my thesis and gaining the opportunity to research various projects, proposals, and designs regarding the virtual/physical divide, I thought it might be a good idea to apply that knowledge to Second Life designs and record it in this blog. The most frequently used categories I have been able to identify regarding this type of project is 'Hybrid Spatial Environments,' 'Mixed Reality Architecture,' and/or 'transArchitecture' (the last coined by Marcos Novak). This encompasses a very large and diverse group of projects and I think it is necessary to begin to find consistency and continuity for this group which will only lend credibility to its development.

With some of the recent projects I have examined and participated in, there is usually an element of recreation, duplication, or the idea of a physical/virtual duality. Examples of this are recent concerts or athletic events 'piped' into SecondLife with the suggestion that one can attend the physical concert or have the opportunity to 'attend' the concert in a virtual environment. I propose instead that we think of a singular structure or event that exists along the
virtual<--->physical continuum. If we can think of it in terms of architecture, it might be a structure which has one end planted in the physical realm and one in the virtual.

Because these two environments (the physical and the virtual) are qualitatively different in terms of physical forces, scripting possibilities etc., an architecture or an environment which can exist across these two realms must contain an idea of consistency or continuity between the two spaces. This blog is dedicated to the identification of those traits as well as architectural proposals that stem from this investigation.