For those who have spent umpteen hours in the virtual world of Second Life, reality may be the next step.
That's the hope of Michael Buckbee, a real-life resident of Virginia Beach, Virginia, and founder of Fabjectory, a startup that sells real objects custom-created from the digital items coded by denizens of Second Life.
Buckbee, who is initially focusing on creating 3- to 7-inch statuettes of Second Life avatars, meets clients as his in-game persona, "Hal9k Andalso," and takes the screenshots necessary to turn their digital selves into polymer using the rapid prototyping machines common in industrial design firms. While his service is just a couple of weeks old, the digital businessman has almost a dozen clients already lined up.
"A lot of this is education, and trying to make this more accessible," Buckbee said. "If you are super great at any of the 3-D applications, you can make something awesome and send it off to the fabrication plant yourself. My target is really to be more of a consumer-level service."
While many companies, such as American Apparel and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, have translated real-life products – clothing and a new hotel chain, respectively – into the virtual domain of Second Life, few companies have gone the other way. Starbase C3 creates model vehicles from Second Life creations. Recursive Instruments announced plans to turn Second Life objects into works of foam and plastic.
Buckbee is the first to get his service off the ground. The virtual designer creates a three-dimensional model of a client's avatar using screenshots taken in the world of Second Life. He uses an open-source design tool known as the OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam OpenLab. After tweaking the model to make sure that there are no overly fragile parts – hair has been a big worry – Buckbee sends the design to the client for final approval. The digital file is then turned into reality using a 3-D printer made by Z Corp.
The final price? Typically less than $100, which has convinced some denizens of Second Life to give the process a go.
"It is still a little cost-prohibitive," said one customer, who asked that only his in-game pseudonym "Todd Borst" be used. "You still really have to want it."
Borst designs in-game familiars, little creatures that sit perched on their owners' shoulders, occasionally performing a simple set of actions. His favorite is a Kung Fu Monkey he created that taunts other avatars; it's the monkey that he asked Fabjectory to re-create.
"I made the avatar look like myself in-game, and creating a mini-statue of yourself is a little narcissistic," Borst said. "But who wouldn't want a statue of a Kung-Fu Monkey?"
Turning virtual items into reality is not a new idea: Science-fiction writers Bruce Sterling and Neil Stephenson have written about futures where objects could be downloaded and created in the home using special printers or fabricators. Sterling dubbed them blobjects or fabjects.
"The actual is the new virtual," Sterling said in an interview with Wired News. "The virtual identities of objects and plans for objects will become more economically important than the actual things."
Buckbee combined the term fabject with factory to create his company's name.
Fabjectory.com has acquired at least one customer from the company that created and manages Second Life, Linden Lab. John Lester, who dons the mantle of "Pathfinder Linden" in the virtual world as the community and education manager, ordered a statuette of his avatar, an anime-inspired mage.
"When I heard about the ability to create these little models, I thought I would love to have one on my desk," Lester said. "I would love to have it passed through the looking glass and make it real."
The process of going to Fabjectory's in-game office and having virtual measurements taken felt a bit like going to a tailor to have a perfectly fitting suit made, Lester said. The Linden Lab employee feels the concept will take off.
"I think people have a lot of emotional attachment to their avatars," Lester said. "They spend money buying clothing and they spend a lot of time changing their appearance. Right now, people are spending money on avatars but as it becomes more affordable, people might want models of the houses that they have in the virtual world."
The market could be enormous in a virtual world like Second Life, where the creators own the rights to the objects that they make, Buckbee said.
"There is a huge number of objects created by users in-world and only 0.0001 percent of those have made it out into the real world," Buckbee said. "This is only the first round of turning virtual objects into real objects and I'm not sure where it is going to go."
