At Tuesday morning’s opening session of Autodesk University 2006, CEO Carl Bass saved his best demo for last to present before a crowd of over 6000 Computer Aided Drafting and 3D modeling enthusiasts at the software maker’s largest annual event. While it had already been posted this past Sunday by corporate blogger Shaan Hurley, Bass’s unveiling of Autodesk Island in the online world of Second Life marks the day in history that the 800 pound gorilla of the CAD market brings its resources and user base to bear in its latest return to cyberspace, a term that reportedly it once attempted to trademark as its own.
The company has been working with San Francisco based Clear Ink , a digital marketing and metaverse development agency to create Autodesk Island as a rarefied extension of the Second Life orientation experience geared toward design professionals and to demonstrate a set of tools for importing data generated offline via Autodesk software packages, including Adrian Herbez’s recreation of Second Life modeling tools in Maya (reminiscent of Jeffrey Gomez’s initiative for the open-sourced Blender), as well as Kiwini Oe’s previously unseen means to map Design Web Format (DWF) drawing files exported from AutoCAD onto a Second Life prim. Currently the island (with a design team including Virtual Suburbia alums Keystone Bouchard and Scope Cleaver ) is only available to Autodesk University attendees, with full access to the public expected sometime after the conference.
A post here at 3pointD back in June linked to an interview with CEO Bass in the Economist where Second Life is cited as a burgeoning yet primitive example of a collaborative environment for architects and engineers to enable their clients to experience and walk through designs in real time, paving the way for future virtual realities that go beyond mere sight and sound to engage the rest of the senses as a tool to affect change in the physical world.
Its a good thing they’ve decided to embrace the technology of today, because this is a future that Autodesk has long envisioned, and that we have waited for a long time to arrive.
Autodesk founder John Walker’s website provides fascinating glimpses into the company’s history, including a white paper from 1988 outlining its original cyberspace strategy. Entitled ‘Through the Looking Glass’, Walker ponders the applicability of their leadership position in the industry:
If cyberspace is such an obvious next step in user/computer interaction, then it’s reasonable to ask why Autodesk should expend any effort to develop the technology in-house. Can’t we just let others do the pioneering and adopt their discoveries as they reach the market?
I think that Autodesk should be a leader in making cyberspace a mainstream technology because Autodesk has several attributes which uniquely qualify us to develop cyberspace. I believe that Autodesk stands to benefit enormously if we are successful in developing the technology and bringing it to market in conjunction with our product line.
We all know where that strategy went. Originally dubbed the ‘Cyberia Project,’ Autodesk was riding the wave of Virtual Reality 1.0 – electronic LSD edition. Propelled by the force of Jaron Lanier’s dreadlocks and Jeff Fahey’s six pack abs, development in this era was largely characterized by a focus on immersion, plugging people into a graphically generated space that was intended to leave nothing to the imagination. Meanwhile, Email, BBS’s, MUD’s, MOO’s and the broader supporting technologies of the Internet were focused on community and connectivity, plugging people into each other via spaces that left almost everything to the imagination. It could be suggested that the success of Second Life lies in its ability to live in both worlds, connective and immersive, yet still evoking a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
So 15 years later and with a new leader at the helm, rather than go it alone Autodesk is now poised to tap into the pioneering work of Linden Lab, the power of its community, and the spirit of all things 3pointD.
Having used AutoCAD myself for over 10 years it will be most interesting to see where this goes. It could also be suggested that one of the reasons Second Life has been so widely accepted is because of its built in creation tools, lowering the barrier to entry for non-professionals (with the exception of Photoshop or the GIMP). Autodesk’s initiative seems to be about lowering the barrier for professionals who arrive with specialized knowledge and expensive tools, and the 6000 or so who attended Tuesday’s demo represent just the tip of the iceberg. Add to this the company’s taste for acquisitions including Discreet’s 3D Studio Max and Alias’s Maya modeling packages, as well as the Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology of Revit, and you have a recipe for climate change in the Second Life ecosystem. Cyberia, indeed.
Chip Poutine is the author of Virtual Suburbia – the Architecture of Second Life®, reviewed on the fly.