Sunday 3 January 2010

Simple homes of the near future

With the recent introduction of the Lindens home scheme there has been a fair amount of backlash from the community regarding the sim city style housing project sims and apparent cattle marketing of residents into homes. I appreciate where the lab is coming from with this, I myself was put of from becoming a premium member after the removal of the 512 land plot but at the same time wasn't the lab explaining almost a year ago that while premium membership was falling it didn't make a real difference since the majority of money was being brought in by land sales and rentals?

Which got me to thinking that perhaps by enticing residents back to premium membership and into homes they aim in the future to try and promote the growth of in world/xstreet sales? I mean if all of a sudden thousands of residents have homes and (assuming they use them) start furnishing them, they've got to get the product from somewhere?

I'm not against this move but in my head the idea of a sim full of resident homes would never be a flat down blueprint, I always imagined a number of layers variously disjointed yet never chaotic taking up the land and sky.

I've had various sketches of homes I thought would befit SL and recently knocked these up in a sandbox:

The open aired playful mansion


The idea behind this was to take a stately home and remove the elements not needed, the doors, the roof, walls etc but keep a sense of home still, the entrance, the horizontal and vertical and add the magical, the play on physics and scale. After building this someone noted it looked alot like a neko build, with scratch posts for seats etc, perhaps they have a point.


The Organic Home


This was really rough, but it comes in under 25 prims with seats and again plays with the idea of fantasy/scale/height, why not have a home as a series of flower pods that can be flown into?

The Alice in Wonderland


I liked this one the most :) it's house sized, has windows, the reminisce of doors and is open befitting an avatar that can fly. For me it's a sense of space and possibilities, if the walls are brought down how do you decorate a home like this?


I let the stairwell going to the roof/floor/top/room as I enjoy keeping part of the real alongside the unreal, it helps the brain agree to what it see's and also helps keep a sense of normality in a scene that's bizarre.

Tubes and Steel


For me aesthetically it's the weakest of the four but is again low prim and just a template to be built upon, I liked the idea of entering a home from all angles, flying up a tube from below, to a platform from above etc.

Viewing platforms for seating and building can easily be expanded upon, again try to imagine this kind of build in greater depth across a sim in vertical layers, the sea level land of the sim being used for...what?


These were pretty quick and simple builds using basic prims but i've made them available in sandboxes when I can with full perms (how do you get freebies into larger circulation?), if anyone wants a copy i'll be boxing these up and adding to a homes pack as a template to build upon, just IM me and i'll send one over :).

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