Export to World, Donut unlock
More about our (Linda Kostowski’s aka realfakewatches and my) workshop/project at Ars Electronica 2007 – Export to World is a contribution to the Second City event in which lots of empty shops on Linz’s Marienstrasse will be transformed by numerous projects that focus on Second Life and its likes.
The biggest buzz about SL, and aruguably also what attracts many users and especially big corporations to it, is its economy and the fact that you can basically sell everything. Yet, it feels a bit strange that in this “metaverse” the paradigm of physical objects as commodities is being reproduced, or simulated in a way that is almost identical to how the first life works. When the Copybot made its brief appearance in SL, the outcry was enormous since many of the vendors felt that their business was endangered. But, was the copybot not only revealing that the things in SL are actually made of data and thus are susceptible to the same effects that music has been facing ever since songs could be digitalized?
The other funny thing is the actual kind of objects you can buy in SL. There are many people who try out their impressive scripted creations in the sandboxes, but there seem to be many more who just want to go to shops and equip their digital homes with food, couches and toilets. SL in many parts either feels like an infinite shopping mall or a residential area and the question why you would want just that in your second life when you could have anything imaginable hasn’t been really answered if this claims to be the new frontier of our world.
We want to comment on some of those aspects by exporting some items from Linden Labs’ digital environment into the physical world in the form of papercraft-models and see what happens. We bought a range of things for a couple L$ and we will hopefully also be able to help people to export their own items during the festival. However, the process as a whole turned out to be pretty work-intensive, especially with complex objects.
Here’s how it works – initially, you have to grab the actual data from SL. This is done through Michael Frumin’s awesome piece of software called OGLE which in turn plugs into GLIntercept. The combination of those two allows to capture the 3D-data and output it into a format readable by most modelling applications. – The imported scene looks very awkward and is encapsulated into some strange geometry which has to be cut away first. (There’s a vaguely eerie quality about those scenes, like being a ghost in Second Life. I remember that turning off clipping in Quake and leaving the map actually used to give me a similar feeling.) – After cutting free the wanted object, you have to re-texture the object with the images that OGLE also saves along and export it as a whole or its parts, depending on how complex it is. – To actually make papercraft-models, we are using a Japanese software called Pepakura Designer that can unfold three-dimensional models onto sheets of paper. Preparing the unfold can be a bit tricky and needs some massaging which we still are collecting experience in. – The result is a 2D object which is ready to be printed out and glued together to become a 3D object again, this time outside of the computer.
Our first exported object was a free donut and we actually only realized in the process that this is probably one of the most difficult shapes to unfold and glue, but anyway, it’s done. You can see some visual documentation of the process in this set on Flickr or behind the various links above.