3pointD.com

A short piece in The New York Times today mentions a very nice tool created by SL resident Hiro Pendragon, a kind of 3D wiki that lets users collaboratively work on designs for the redevelopment of a real-world park. We blogged about the park project a while back, before the wiki was up, but this addition certainly merits more attention, as it’s a good example of the kind of tools that can be built in SL with a bit of thought, creativity and application — and also an unexpected case of a 2D tool suddenly sprouting a third dimension.

How does it work? The wiki comes in the form of a box that hovers above a scale re-creation of a park in Queens, New York (which was built using Google Maps data). The wiki can be moved around the virtual park using the green arrows (see picture above). When you’re above a site you want to alter, the wiki allows you to place pre-made objects like trees, swingsets and pathways. Your configuration of the park can then be saved, shared, edited and later reloaded into the model. (Read more on Jerry Paffendorf’s blog.)

As 3D building tools go, it’s a great idea. If you and I are collaborating on a project, I don’t have to wait until you’re online to do my work. Instead, I can simply load your latest design, add or edit in my contribution, and save that iteration for you to check out later. If we don’t like it, we can always roll back to an earlier version. And there seems no reason such a tool should be limited to things like designing physical spaces, either. Practically any object should be able to be saved and manipulated this way.

Perhaps more importantly, the 3D wiki is a great example of what I’ve been calling (since about 30 seconds ago, when I changed the title of this post) the unexpected third dimension. Check out the definition of the word “wiki” on Wikipedia (of all places):

. . . a type of website that allows users to add, remove, or otherwise edit and change all content very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website. . . .

Clearly, that’s going to have to change.

What I love about Hiro’s 3D wiki is that it pops a third dimension out of something commonly thought to have only two. I wonder how many other words and meanings are going to have to expand to take in this idea as we increasingly move into a 3pointD-connected world. We’ve already seen an unexpected third dimension pop out of tagging, with tools like Platial, Community Walk, ZoneTag and Flagr (among many others), as well as virtual location-tagging in the form of SLurlMarkers.

I expect there’s much more of this to come as the metaverse continues to grow, and as the real, three-dimensional world around us becomes more and more connected through technologies such as RFID, GPS, Bluetooth and the other components of an Internet of things. If anyone has any ideas for unexpected third dimensions you think we should be looking out for, I’d love to have you share them here.