Web Worker Daily

As an active resident in Second Life as part of my Web work, I am fascinated by the exploration of virtual world environments as platforms for “wikitecture” which essentially is collaborative planning and design. The process is being tested by architects and urban planners, but for anyone building in 3-dimensional spaces, wikitecture could be the next wave of collaboration.

One of the companies exploring wikitecture is Studio Wikitecture, creator of an open-source, 3-D Wiki plug-in for Second Life in partnership with i3dnow that facilitates the creation of a “wiki-tree” to design objects such as building models.

In June, the company’s entry placed third in an international competition hosted by Architecture for Humanity on the Open Architecture Network. The company demonstrated their application by bringing together dozens of web workers from around the world to collaboratively design and build a 3-D model of a medical center in rural Nepal.

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Call me skeptical. Call me cynical. Call me shortsighted. But I just can’t see what the new company Qwaq offers that is different or better than what is already out there. Here’s how the company describes its offering:

Qwaq, Inc. creates virtual spaces for real work. The company’s product, Qwaq Forums, is the leading secure virtual workspace application for the enterprise, and enables collaboration in ways that weren’t possible before. Designed for enterprises and groups with distributed teams, Qwaq Forums significantly increases productivity by bringing critical resources together in virtual spaces, and allowing people to work together as if they were in the same physical location.

Can someone say “Second Life?” or any other virtual world or virtual world application already out there?

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