A Parallel Universe - What the virtual world can do for planning

A Parallel Universe
What the virtual world can do for planning

By Chris Steins
This article was first published in the American Planning Association's Planning magazine (January, 2007).

Here's the sales pitch: "Exclusive luxury homes on Anhinga Island. Fabulous ocean and lake views. Residents and invited guests only. Only 16 lots available. Going fast!"

Elliott Eldrich is a prosperous developer of exclusive resort island properties that are in high demand. His houses rent for $8,000 Linden dollars a month–roughly $26 in U.S. currency.

Linden dollars?

Yes, Linden dollars. Anhinga is an island in a virtual reality game called "Second Life." The man who goes by the name "Elliot Eldrich" in Second Life lives his real ("first") life in Spokane, Washington, as a semiretired engineer, burned out after 23 years in Silicon Valley. He supplements his savings as a developer in this virtual environment, earning about $500 per month in the process.

He is also on track to double that income within six months. Less than a month after my first interview with Eldrich last October, he had acquired two additional islands and was about to acquire a fourth.

Free-for-all?

If you're one of the million or so people worldwide who participate in the virtual world called Second Life, you can use the game's virtual environment to interact with others, design buildings, develop communities, or construct your own island, complete with an economy, design guidelines, and the headaches that come with a real community. But calling Second Life a game understates the potential of the technology.

"Our experience in the virtual world can help us to improve planning in the real world," says Ron Blechner (whose Second Life alias is Hiro Pendragon), a partner at Infinite Vision Media in Woburn, Massachusetts. His firm creates virtual places; one real world client is New York City's LaGuardia Airport.

Second Life is one of several new simulation platforms that allow users to interact in a virtual setting. In the technology industry, these platforms are referred to by the acronym MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Unlike the popular game Sim City, which uses a computer algorithm to simulate how a city will evolve, activities in Second Life are governed by real people with the ability to act individually.

A participant in Second Life--called a resident-- assumes the role of a fictional character, called an avatar. Each avatar represents a real person making decisions about how to act in the virtual environment, just as in the real world. (Avatars communicate by typing on a keyboard, through online gestures--such as waving, pointing, nodding, and laughing--and speaking to one another, although speech is less common.)

Second Life is unique among the role-playing virtual world games for two reasons. First, the participants follow no directive from the creators of the game. Further, Second Life is one of the only virtual worlds where participants legally own the content they create, providing an incentive for entrepreneurship.

The Second Life economy mirrors the real world economy in that there is an official currency, the Linden ($L). The exchange rate is about 300 Linden dollars for one U.S. dollar, and the currency may be bought and sold on LindeX, Second Life's official currency exchange. Linden Lab, the San Francisco-based firm that created Second Life, estimates that about $650,000 U.S. dollars are spent on Second Life in any given 24-hour period.

Linden Lab makes money from Second Life through monthly subscription fees from users, the sale of virtual lands, advertising, the exchange of U.S. dollars into Linden dollars, and a variety of other services.

Some think that Second Life will start a long-term trend. "Without a doubt, a sizable percentage of highly developed countries' gross national products will be created in virtual places by 2020," says Dirk Harms-Merbitz (alias Dirk DaSilva in Second Life), founder of the virtual reality consulting firm called Venuma. "We're at the beginning of a decade of rapid growth in this technology, not unlike where the Internet was in 1994."

Planning in Second Life

With some notable exceptions, there are few restrictions on land use in Second Life, and this absence of control is apparent in the numerous examples of incongruous land uses: A mega casino that allows hang gliding from its six-story roof towers above a small farm and the single-family houses next door.

Still, places that are well designed and offer a reasonable mix of uses tend to be the most popular and generate the highest lease and purchase prices. Even in virtual environments, it turns out, good planning, urban design, and zoning are valuable.

Although Linden Lab may exert some control over land use, it rarely does. Instead, control falls to individual property owners. Perhaps the closest real-world match would be a combination of the anything-goes entrepreneurship of Hong Kong and the limited range of property controls used in Houston, Texas.

Some of the problems related to planning in Second Life are uniquely digital, while others mirror the issues faced in real life.

On the digital side of the ledger is the matter of computer capacity. The more resources a business uses or avatars it attracts, the slower the virtual environment appears to everyone nearby. At a certain threshold, visitors are locked out of the area. In Second Life, this is called "lag."

"Virtual places look and feel similar to our normal everyday reality," says Harms-Merbitz. "However, this similarity can be misleading. Programs or scripts control the behaviors of objects," which is why a house can suddenly transform itself into a pink elephant in Second Life.

A real-life metaphor is building the out-ofplace McMansion. In real life, this process takes time--at least the time needed to construct the McMansion. In Second Life, changes like this can happen in a matter of seconds.

The concept of zoning appears to be taking hold slowly. Linden recently introduced areas of land that are reserved for parkland. "Our goal with the parkland is to create a space, free of clutter, to encourage roaming and quiet," says Catherine Smith (alias Catherine Linden), director of marketing for Linden Lab. "We encourage the use of Second Life as an urban planning tool."

A life of its own

At one point, Linden Lab created a planned residential area called Shermerville. Shermerville's landowning residents continue to operate the community as a virtual suburb--an "ideal place for building a small home in which to live, far away from the loud clubs and the laggy malls."

Residents are allowed to open small shops to sell their wares, but Shermerville is primarily residential. And while it is not a zoned community, it does have rules. These are some of them:

Clubs, casinos, and malls are not allowed.
Residents can't modify the geography of their property (a function called "terraforming").
Residents must keep buildings within their own property lines.
No buildings may be taller than 20 meters (65 feet) unless they are approved by the neighborhood association.
Large mansions are acceptable, as long as they stay within property lines and under the height restriction.
Developments must avoid large signs, flashy textures, the use of flashing particles, and loud sounds.

How land ownership works

Land in Second Life is divided into regions, also called sims, and parcels. Each parcel has a number of variables that restrict access, establish a price to enter, allow or disallow the use of weapons, and even control the audio and video that a visitor experiences. A parcel is an individual section of a sim that can be leased or sold to an individual owner. There are roughly 3,000 Second Life regions, and each region can support between 40 and 100 avatars.

Second Life charges a monthly fee for property ownership. The fee is tiered and discounted as one acquires more land. For larger spaces, one can acquire one or more "islands" and choose among six different typologies, or provide a terrain file to create a specialized island. Some enterprising landowners combine several islands to create a contiguous space. One advantage to acquiring an island is that the owner can choose to limit access, creating a sort of virtual gated community, as Elliot Eldrich has done with his island of Anhinga.

Real fees are paid for ownership of this virtual world real estate. Islands are priced at US$1,675 for about 16 acres, and monthly land fees for maintenance are US$295. Large islands are priced at US$5,000 for about 64 acres, and monthly land fees for maintenance are US$780.

Real estate development

AnsheChung Studios, Ltd., based in China, is a virtual real estate development firm that has used planning to its advantage. Anshe Chung, an avatar in Second Life, was originally created by Ailin Graef, a Chinese-born language teacher living near Frankfurt, Germany.

With her husband, Chung acquired a variety of sims, most of which are sold to other users as a series of planned communities that she calls Dreamlands--each with a different theme. There are currently 12 sims available, including a Dreamland Japan and Dreamland Mediterranean.

Chung's firm has acquired virtual land and currency holdings worth about US$250,000. These funds can be converted from $L to $US through the LindeX, or Second Life currency exchange. Unlike the real world, there aren't obvious appraisal standards, and the Second Life market value of land or goods is exactly what another resident is willing to pay.

The sims that Chung controls command a premium in the Second Life property market because she exercises zoning control over what is built in her sims to ensure a consistent theme. The AnsheChung Zoning Ruleset A includes the following section:

"Some sims have a special theme. In such sims you absolutely have to respect the theme. If you don't want to speak French, please don't move to a French sim. If you don't like Victorian style architecture, please don't move to a Victorian sim. There is a lot of choice available and we are always open to suggestions for themes in new sims."

AnsheChung Studios conducts transactions valued at over US$1 million in virtual land, goods, and services per year. The company has generated so much business that earlier this year the government of Hubei, China, granted AnsheChung Studios special status as a privileged high-tech enterprise, recognizing its potential as an innovator and creator of high-skill jobs in the Wuhan province.

Prime of life

In Second Life, you start not with bricks and steel but with an object you may never have heard of: a primitive, or "prim." A prim is fundamentally an object--a cube, sphere, or prism, for example--to which properties can be assigned. Properties include texture, color, size, solidity, and over 100 other characteristics. By assembling a set of prims, a designer can construct an airplane, a building, a street, or an entire community, among other things.

"More than space or land, prims are the key commodity in Second Life," says Harms- Merbitz. "Transforming prims is how people convert their time and skill into economic value in Second Life."

But there is a catch. The more prims used, the more computer resources are needed to display the virtual environment, and the slower the experience becomes. When property is purchased in Second Life, the purchase includes not just the virtual space, but also an allocation of prims that are available for the owner to use to build in the space. Top designers in Second Life have not only a polished sense of aesthetics, but also the technical ability to design complex structures elegantly, using the smallest possible number of prims.

Couple these requirements with the need to control the surrounding land use, and it is easy to see that planning in a virtual world has many of the complexities of planning in real life.

Virtual reality models

Designers have been using three-dimensional, virtual reality models for some years, but until now, most models of places or structures have been costly to create.

"The problem with conventional VR [virtual reality] models is that they're expensive to demo," says Jon Lonner, vice president for Lee Homes, a real estate development company based in Southern California. "And if you do use a VR model, it's mostly at the end of the design phase--after the architectural designs have been accepted--because it's too expensive to use VR to come up with ideas."

Second Life makes it easier and cheaper to share virtual places. The cost to build is nominal, and participants can visit each other's creations in real time, or even build collaboratively. Take the case of Landing Lights Park, half a square mile of mostly abandoned land near New York City's LaGuardia Airport. The airport plans to invest nearly $100 million later this year to overhaul the property.

To save money on a full landscape architecture study, the local planning board hired Second Life developer Ron Blechner of Infinite Vision Media. The board asked Blechner to build a 5:1 scale model of the actual Landing Lights project and allow Second Life residents to suggest designs for the park. That collection of park models will be taken into account when the board decides on a design and hires an architect.

"It's my hope that through online, interactive community efforts, citizens can take more of an active role in our government," says Blechner. "Urban planning is an excellent example of something that online worlds can help change because it's visual."

The downside? "Landing Lights is a fairly complex task," says Blencher. "While the building tools in Second Life are robust and most people can grasp them in a few days, that is simply too long for a casual user."

Designed spaces

In addition to planned communities, there are also (for lack of a better term) designed communities. These are sims with a theme based on an existing place. Two popular sims are Dublin and Amsterdam.

Dublin sim is the creation of Ham Rambler, a Dubliner living in London. Daily events are scheduled at the Blarney Stone Irish Bar, and shops feature a variety of Irish and Second Life souvenirs. Residents both live and work in the sim.

Amsterdam, designed by Stroker Serpentine, is modeled after its namesake city in the Netherlands. The design includes replicas of Dam Square, Nieumarkt (Amsterdam's main street), Achterburgwal (the red-light district), Central Station (the train station), and the House of Pain Nightclub.

Each region in Second Life is designated as "mature" or "PG." A "mature" rating indicates that sexually explicit content is acceptable. As in the real city, and like a fair percentage of places in Second Life, there is a strong sexual focus in Amsterdam. In the red-light district, Second Life residents can legally retain the services of an escort to engage in virtual sex, or watch a mostly naked dancer perform, as well as shop for sex-related goods or watch adult videos.

What's ahead

Planning in Second Life is a bit like being in the 19th century, when businesses and the wealthy controlled development. However, Second Life residents are rapidly exerting more control over their virtual environment, and the Second Life market shows that well-planned communities have greater economic value than those that aren't.

How can planners use Second Life today? The tools that enable the creation of structures and communities are evolving daily. (The popular Google SketchUp tool has been adapted recently, allowing SketchUp models to be imported into Second Life.) Already, Second Life has proven to be a cost-effective environment for visioning, education, and model-building. It may not be long before we begin to see community design review meetings that take place in a virtual environment like Second Life.