ALoft Hotels is apparently building their hotel in Second Life before they build it in the real world Or maybe at the same time, or maybe it’s all a scam. I’m not saying that it is, but it could be. What if it’s only going to appear in Second Life??
They bought an Island in Second Life for their Hotel. And then hired a firm to build the second life version. Here are some articles on their blog about the construction of their hotel, including an interesting article where a manager from Aloft visited the site and was surprised to see avatars in SL running around actually building the hotel.
Of course that’s because you can’t build things off-world and import them into second life. I’ll bet for uses like this they wish they could convert their CAD drawings of the actual building to SL and import them. But nope. that does not work based on the way the Second Life primitives work.
IMHO, Second Life will have a relatively short life. Someone will come along with a world that can support importing of normal content. The reason for importing content is compelling because there is so much of it out there, built by thousands of people using hundreds of different tools. To build for SL you only have the choice of SL, or maybe 3 outside tools. These outside tools require foolish converters that let you convert new content built in the tools such as Blender, or Maya, to Second Life. It is not possible, based on the restrictions of second life primitives, to import content that already exists.
Let’s all watch what happens.
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Windy Weather 