The House In The Sky

We are in London! continues...

We will be moving into our new house in California in early December. One of the hardest parts about moving is figuring out where everything should go. Our new house is a completely different species than our old house, so it's going to be particularly difficult to figure out.

John suggested I use Second Life to create the house and then we could move the furniture around in it to see what works and what doesn't. So I did.

I am building the house up in the sky 400 meters above my islands. I love having visitors to my islands and have met and talked to a lot of very nice people. But when I'm concentrating on building it's too distracting.

Yesterday I uploaded the floor plan and started by arranging the furniture on it but soon realized that I need to build the actual structure. That is the hard part. The biggest problem is the scale. I am not skilled enough to figure out how to read the plans and do the correct scale in Second Life. But I came up with something that is close enough. If anything, the scale is too small, so when we get to the actual house it will feel larger. I am also throwing my OCD to the wind and not making it all look perfect. It just needs to work well enough to do the furniture plan.

As beautiful as it is, the new house is actually less square footage than our old house, so a few pieces of furniture are going to have to go. I created an inventory of facsimiles of our existing furniture and put it off to the side so I have an idea of what we have and then can decide what needs to go where. The perfectionist in me wants to buy gorgeous, expensive Second Life furniture but I'm just using a bunch of freebies and a few things I made, like bookcases. It turns out we don't really have that much actual furniture, but we have 20 bookcases, yikes.

The semi-completed living room bears a startling resemblance to the real one. Fingers crossed that this project makes moving day easier.

Comments

[Tim]

Cool idea!

I wonder when the first real-world house is going to be sold using Second Life. Imagine being able to go through the house in Second Life, possibly meeting the owners, perhaps try out your furniture in it, etc. Might be a nice option for people who are moving a long way.

I know architects often generate 3D walk throughs of houses, I wonder if it is possible to import the models generated into Second Life...

Hope the concert goes well this weekend!