Having designed one kitchen already with Ikea's kitchen planner 3D tool, I decided to give realxtend a go. My world hosted at simhost.com served as the testbed. Conclusion: Despite shortcomings offers a great way to experience spaces that do not exist.
After some trials I could not get the Ikea kitchen planner to
run on my Windows 7. As the former program manager of the realXtend
project, I decided to give realXtend a change to show how it can
help me.
Inspired by Jon Brouchoud, a real architect who is using virtual
worlds for architecture, I took the plans of my not-yet-built house
and made them into a texture. I uploaded it to my realXtend virtual
world, which is hosted by simhost.com.
With the image of the plans being exactly cut at the measured
outer walls, it was easy to adjust it to the actual 1:1 size on the
land I was going to build the virtual kitchen on. From my previous
experience I know how small 1:1 spaces feel in a virtual world
setting, I decided to scale it up by a factor of two. This proved
to be a mistake as I ended up being like I was a toddler in the
kitchen. It made it hard to even look around. For virtual worlds
this is a great use - to experience things like someone else would
experience them, in this case, as small kids.
At that point I had built much of the kitchen and did not want
to scale down and redo much of the work. I scaled up my avatar so
that it was roughly about 3.6 meters high giant - twice my size.
That helped me to understand the dimensions better.
After everything was in place for the first version of the
kitchen I decided that it did not feel roomy enough for all the
family members. I selected everything and copied the kitchen, and
moved it some distance away from the first version. Then I made the
changes and this allowed me to compare the designs.
This all took me three hours of work, and I am not an
experienced builder. I used only prims, mostly cubes. I did not try
to make things look exactly like they are, but used colors which
were near-match for the material at that place.
Now my next step is to build some of the things in a proper 3D
design program, most probably in Google's SketchUp and then import
it to my realXtend world for a better user experience. There are
also a lot of items at Google 3D Warehouse, which I can use to
populate the design. I believe that this is going to be a good tool
also in later stages when I want to test how a new setup for
furniture is going to work.
Another advanced use could be to control music and media and
automation at the house from within the virtual world. I will plan
this as I go.
Keep up with the development and follow me: snowcrashme
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