HIOW: Virtual Providence

I've never been much into Second Life and the other alternative worlds that have caught fire online of late. My current passion much more about how the web can support and enhance our pavement-level interactions, which often get short shrift to the virtual world. Last week at the Providence Geeks confab, I saw a project that brings those things together.

The folks at Eyegloo are working on recreating downtown Providence in Second Life, the most wide-ranging and immersive of the current 3-D online worlds. We saw some early versions of walking (and flying) around Providence, including the Biltmore, the completed Westin, and the Convention Center.

Why is this more than a parlor trick? A couple of reasons:

• Virtual Providence blends the virtual with the real, creating a parallel place where visitors and citizens can interact with not just the city that is, but the city that will be. Real interactions can cross that secondlife-streetlife barrier, initially to promote commerce - see, spec and build your new condo at Waterplace, by interacting with the architect and development company ! Visit the new restaurant on Federal Hill, browse the real menu, and have a virtual meal ! But if the City takes hold of this, you could imagine virtual town halls, online tours of alternative visions of the waterfront, or even rapidly developed school designs, based on feedback from a neighborhood or online meeting the night before.

• Which leads to the second compelling element of Virtual Providence, open source extensibility. Because Second Life has developed its own language for modeling and creating visual 3-d worlds, anyone could extend Virtual Providence. Summit Neighborhood Association, who are working on re-visioning North Main, could build a Virtual North Main based on the community vision of what could be. Providence Public Schools, Ai3 architects, and East Side Public Education Coalition could build a working version of the Nathan Bishop the community is demanding.

A few other points, one optimistic, the other troubling. Optimistic: the technology underlying Second Life has enormous promise to stand traditional community planning and visioning on its head. Although architects and planners would claim an iterative, collaborative process, the limitations of arranging public meetings, funneling feedback, and creating architectural renderings that are "professional" has forced a linear, filtered, overly mediated approach. A virtual world where you could build out, alter, or present multiple versions in a few hours or days in response to community feedback would blow up the process of community planning and development as we know it. These versions would be visually immersive, and much more evocative than the "perspectives" and "overlays" of today's architects and urban planners. The first city (and architect/planning firm !) to harness this effectively will dramatically alter how planning works with the public, for the better.

This brings up the troubling point: inclusiveness. Even though Virtual Providence is less of a fantasy geek's paradise than, say, Dracula's Castle (another Second Life "island"), it still is the purview of the young and the wired. Income and age continue to play an enormous role in the digital divide in Providence and around the country, and we continue to approach the challenge clumsily, with brute force solutions. An online community that narrows the social environment conversation even further will promote no interesting connections, and create no buy-in.

Here lies an opportunity. Our attempts to bridge the digital divide have focused single-mindedly on equal access and foundation skills: computers in libraries and schools, wireless for all, Windows training for seniors. Recent research in learning shows that learners, of any age, can be started out further up the scale of complexity than we previously thought, interacting with an interesting and exciting application rather than laboring on the underlying theory. Lets invest in facilitation of new groups into something like Virtual Providence - immigrants, seniors, working poor - giving them something exciting, visually compelling, and emotionally relevant. Sounds better than Excel skills anyday.