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TONY meets jbSL

Posted on December 6, 2006

This week, Time Out New York featured our first Second Life project, the jen bekman gallery presence (our progenitor also does all the jen bekman marketing materials). It’s only a capsule piece, but does cover the general background. He, we decided to spend some time talking about he specifics of making the jbSL space (this is the SLURL — that’s a direct link in world if you have an SL account).

The design of the space started initially as an attempt to mimic precise the physical jen bekman space on Spring Street. It was the most expeditious response, given a limited time frame, but interesting transposition questions arose right away: unconstrained by physics, and featuring a viewpoint that was highly malleable. In SL, by default you take the ‘traditional’ first person video game position, with the camera situation just behind your head. This makes navigation easier for those not used to immersive 3-d environments, and provides peripheral vision that you lack from ‘mouse-view’ (which is the SL terms for the fully immersive view).

Since a gallery is all about ‘looking’, and to many users, SL is no more, as soon as we started building we encountered problems — the narrow dimensions of the bekman space couldn’t be reproduced, since the default camera position when looking across the transverse axis (the only way to see the art dead-on) put the camera outside the gallery, and the requirements of isometric dimensional projects made the art seem much smaller when reproduced at actual size.

So everything got bigger, an effect of SL in general: space is cheap, and the viewpoint challenges listed above come into play in all building situation. We had also hoped to find an environment that mirrors the character of NoLIta, where the jen bekman galler is located. Time constraints made this difficult, along with the realization that, given an abundance of cheap land, dense urban environments are still a number virtual years away.

We held to the physical characteristics of the space — exposed brick on one wall, pressed-tin ceiling. The major changes had to do with circulation: locations in SL can be approached from every axis, as well as a direct teleport, so entry points are less hierarchical. Many places even dispense with a roof, since there is no weather, and many residents fly around. Seeing actual activity or interior characteristics can draw people in.

We kept to a pretty didactic notion of a gallery, embracing a traditional modernist gallery aesthetic. The details I enjoyed most were the chance to use terrazzo for the flooring material, and inserting an almost transparent threshold between the ‘main entrance’ and the gallery proper (teleporting deposits you on the ‘porch’ seen in the photo above). It is a pretty basic exercise in delineating separation between inside and out, but done without all the tribulations one encounters in RL with walkable glass surfaces.

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