PSP: Public Spawn Point

PSP: PUBLIC SPAWN POINT

Graduate Thesis 2022

Gerry Tao

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Graduate Thesis 2022

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Graduate Thesis 2022 p.04

Statement

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Methodology

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Project

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Provocations

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Thesis Statement The thesis designs a metaverse entrance space with the architectural mind. Virtual lands are becoming expansive, but the entrance of lands is often ignored. In architecture history, the door, the entrance space, and the transition experience that architecture brings to the user are typically most emphasized during architectural design.

In 2022, a land in the metaverse application, the Sandbox, sold 4.3 million dollars, which breaks the world record. As it is receiving attention and being pushed by decentralized developers around the world, the metaverse will become a part of our life. When it happens, we need architectural experience in virtual space as we need it in reality. Login most lands in the metaverse are like entering a five-star hotel

Graduate Thesis 2022

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from an unpaved, muddy road. The thesis tries to find a design that brings users dignity with ceremoniousness.

Unlike architectural design in reality, which welcomes users from outside, the metaverse entrance transits from inside to outside. This process requires the space to have the quality that brings users the presence of untraditional and unprecedented design language compared to architecture in reality. As the design sets up an environment in cyberspace, the design brings existing online assets, rescale, and resample into the body of transition space.

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You can’t just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor.

Materializing out of nowhere (or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best done in the confines of your own House. Most avatars nowadays are anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in any case, you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the Street. Unless you’re something intrinsically indecent and you don’t care.

- Snow Crash

“What is a rite?” asked the little prince.

“Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox.

“They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all.”

- The Little Prince

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Media: Metaverse The thesis brings architectural thinking to the media of metaverse. The metaverse was first mentioned in the novel Snow Crash, written by Neal Stephenson in 1993, yet the metaverse is still not entering architecture and has no rich building types.

Graduate Thesis 2022

1. The Portal Hub - The terminal brings players to lands in the Sandbox 2. The Alpha Lobby - The entrance of the Sandbox

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Don't Lose Ceremoniousness The metaverse entrance is long time been ignored. Entering to metaverse is primarily dominated by software engineers but not experience experts. Architects in metaverse must design architectural elements, including the entering procedure.

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Remember: "you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the street"

1. In the Sandbox, players spawn on a podium and stack on each other 2. In Second Life, players appear as ghosts when the system does not load them on time

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Publicity: Everyone's Entrance The lands in the metaverse are expansive. As of today, the minimal price for one piece of suburban land in the Sandbox is worth around $3,000. It means the vast majority of the metaverse users are “meta-homeless.” I’m interested in the public Spawn Point used by vast people who don’t have their private estates in the metaverse but still need a sense of ritual to enter the metaverse. Therefore, It has to abolish luxury, become normalization and embrace publicity.

Graduate Thesis 2022

1. The Sandbox public areas for every players 2. The Sandbox private lands that only allows invited personal enter

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A Entrance Space is Not A Door I look into the opening of each player’s story.

The spawn point is the building type that starts every player’s story: to everyone who visits the metaverse. The thesis designs a space, but not simply a door. It is a volume, an opening show of a huge comparison between the real and digital worlds. Huge, complicated, and sublime.

Graduate Thesis 2022

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At the end of the wood was the fountainhead of the stream. The fisherman beheld a hill, with a small opening from which issued a glimmer of light. He stepped ashore to explore the crevice. His first steps took him into a passage that accommodated only the width of one person. After he progressed about scores of paces, it suddenly widened into an open field. The land was flat and spacious. There were houses arranged in good order with fertile fields, beautiful ponds, bamboo groves, mulberry trees and paths crisscrossing the fields in all directions. The crowing of cocks and the barking of dogs were within everyone’s earshot. In the fields the villagers were busy with farm work. Men and women were dressed like people outside. They all, old and young, appeared happy.

- A Tale of the Fountain of the Peach Blossom Spring

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1. Cenotaph for Newton - Étienne-Louis Boullée 2. Cenotaph for Turenne - Étienne-Louis Boullée

Graduate Thesis 2022

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Plan of the Parthenon 2. Oscar Newman’s Underground City Beneath Manhattan

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Inside-Out Unlike traditional architectural design processes that consider much of the exterior facade, the entrance space only considers the inside space because all users are coming from completely another level rather than coming from the “outside“ of the metaverse. It gives the entrance space full autonomy to grow from inside without being limited by footprint (as long as it is within a piece of land).

Laurentian Library Entrance Section and Plan

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Luigi Moretti’s Structures and Sequences of Spaces

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Methodology: Reinterpretation The metaverse entrance is settled down on the digital world. I use digital’s natural elements and compose the design. I am using online 3D assets and scattering them on the interior surface. These geometries will potentially have their program or become the interior facade.

A few others’ examples show this thesis’s design language and principle.

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Liu Xin Augmented Library Aggregation

Graduate Thesis 2022

Liu Xin Augmented Library Aggregation

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Siyao Zheng SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis 2019

Graduate Thesis 2022

Siyao Zheng SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis 2019

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Siyao Zheng SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis 2019

Graduate Thesis 2022

Siyao Zheng SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis 2019

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Project: Public Spawn Point The metaverse entrance is settled down on the digital world. I use digital’s natural elements and compose the design. I am using online 3D assets and scattering them on the interior surface. These geometries will potentially have their program or become the interior facade.

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Workshop: Provocations

The provocation workshop started with three questions and AI generated text and images. The answers are currently DRAFT. The text generator credit: GPT-2 The image generator credit: VQGAN+Clip

How does the use of platforms and AI for the automation of intellectual labor impact the agency of individual designers?

The AI platforms create a new type of architecture industry.

Before the time when architects didn’t use the platform of AI, the architectural design required personal ability.

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While the platform of AI, especially when some architects are operating and modifying the AI base codes, these architects use their intelligence to create their industry.

How does the investment of labor, energy, and capital in the production of design technology influence power structures it creates?

Because the platforms allow a certain number of architects to use them, they will soon lead the application of platforms. Some hard-core technical architects even create platforms and earn more. When the industry value doesn’t change in total, a new class of architects that takes share will make traditional architects suffer more.

What opportunities does automating repetitive tasks in architectural production have for reshaping contemporary practice.

The automation first may generate unexpected results as a reference for architects. The black box of AI neural networks works in a completely different way from human brains and will provide alternative aesthetics. The AI handles repetitive tasks fast, allowing Baroque revival again with the help of the computer in contemporary.

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"SPAWN"

Graduate Thesis 2022

"You can not just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse"

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“Materializing out of nowhere or vanishing back into Reality is considered to be a private function best done in the confines of your own House.”

Graduate Thesis 2022

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“You have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the Street”

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You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere (or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best done in the confines of your own House. Most avatars nowadays are anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in any case, you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the Street.

Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care.

Graduate Thesis 2022

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(For the sake of consistency with real life, we're going to assume that you have a "House". It isn't necessary to have a physical home because the Metaverse is entirely virtual, and people live in homes all the time for much the same reasons you would live in a real home.)

these things at the most minute level in order to make sense of your business. These will almost certainly cause you real headaches, because even if you're in the right business at the right time, a problem could arise because you didn't sufficiently consider it at the time of building your house.

You start your own house. You'll probably need to pay for the construction and perhaps some maintenance. You'll probably be charged for the use of your own property, possibly to the point that you're not too impressed. You're probably not going to do very well in your first few weeks, because you'll have to make some real estate decisions quickly:

You may have to move around a lot if you make big business deals, since people may start trying to "outbid" you for contracts, or for a piece of your business. If you decide to change your business to a more high-risk type, that could well also involve you moving around a lot. You may be forced into a variety of contracts over time, where you'll have to prove that you are worth paying for, or not. And you'll have to think carefully about whether or not all the work you put into your business is worth it compared with all the time you'll be spending commuting, or sleeping on your elbows, or dealing with other people's demands.

Which part of town is best for your business, based upon your own preferences and personal tastes?

Which businesses will give you the biggest return?

Which would be more useful and effective overall, and more of a "job", than your current gig?

Which will give you the maximum opportunity for profit, and give your family more of a return on their business than any part they might find?

Do these options sound more appealing than your current employment?

It's true that these decisions are very much part of your private business, and that you can "sell" them to other people, but again, we're talking about the House here. When you live in a House, you have to think about

Even if you do get contracts from other people, the work itself still will probably keep you from sleeping like a baby all the time and...

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If you are some peon who does not own a House, for example, a person who is coming in from a public terminal, then you materialize in a Port. There are 256 Express Ports on the street, evenly spaced around its circumference at intervals of 256 kilometers. Each of these intervals is further subdivided 256 times with Local Ports, spaced exactly one kilometer apart (astute students of hacker semiotics will note the obsessive repetition of the number 256, which is 2^8 power— and even that 8 looks pretty juicy, dripping with 2^2 additional 2s). The Ports serve a function analogous to airports: This is where you drop into the Metaverse from somewhere else. Once you have materialized in a Port, you can walk down the Street or hop on the monorail or whatever.

Graduate Thesis 2022

All the Portal Network uses is its core infrastructure, its central hubs, the 256 Express Ports, along with their physical locations. There are also many other smaller sites scattered about the Street, including a few more Port Depots. The vast majority of the portal network does not provide a Portal for every Portal Network site. It provides a Portal to every Portal Network site where someone has a Portal. This allows the Metaverse to operate on a distributed and decentralized basis. Because people don't need to get on a Portal Network site to visit it, this enables the Portal Network to operate on a small scale. But with only the core physical infrastructure, the capacity of the Metaverse is low, and as a result, the Metaverse doesn't have very many users, per their stated objective. However, since the physical infrastructure exists at all times, the Portal Network is not vulnerable to physical attacks from people wishing to destroy it. (For more on this, see Appendix A.) While its physical structure may not allow for much, it nevertheless does provide a significant amount of real estate that can be utilized for the purpose of hosting Portal Networks (and other activities). So long as there is some real estate and/or physical space available near all the portals, the Metaverse can remain functioning and functional. It provides its own transportation services , which have the advantage of providing a way for portal users to travel from site to site through the physical streets and physical infrastructure provided by the Portal Network.

And since portals exist near all existing portals—they all share the same physical presence on the Street—these portals can act as a network as well, providing a way for other people to visit each other's sites.

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For all these reasons, however, the capacity of the system is low. It cannot support as much real estate and physical space as it would like, unless the people who actually live in the Metaverse would like it to.

As you'll see in the next chapter, however, if there is a substantial enough segment of the population whose lives would be altered for the better if it supported a larger quantity of people, then the people of the Metaverse might not stop there.

What Are the Goals? There are many goals that motivate people in designing and building the Metaverse: The Metaverse's goals are generally consistent with the human goals that lead us to build the buildings and build things, such as bridges, roads and factories. And many of their goals are related to the very idea of living in a society of living things—with cities, cars, planes...

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He owes the Mafia the cost of a new car.

That's a good reason to get serious. He cuts straight across the Street and under the monorail line, headed for a large, low-slung black building. It is extraordinarily somber for the Street, like a parcel that someone forgot to develop. It's a squat black pyramid with the top cut off. It has one single door— since this is all imaginary, there are no regulations dictating the number of emergency exits. There are no guards, no signs, nothing to bar people from going in, yet thousands of avatars mill around, peering inside, looking for a glimpse of something. These people can't pass through the door because they haven't been invited. Above the door is a matte black hemisphere about a meter in diameter, set into the front wall of the building. It is the closest thing the place has to decoration. Underneath it, in letters carved into the wall's black substance, is the name of the place: THE BLACK SUN.

Graduate Thesis 2022

This is not the kind of room you want a crime lord to be entering, no matter how tempting it may appear. "The Black Sun?" the player asks. "Is it like a black hole?

What's all the fuss, anyway?" "Black suns get their name from the fact that they suck in matter and emit nothing.

They're known to give people headaches or bad dreams." "Like you were gonna come in and try to steal stuff?!" the player asks. "If you've got the stuff, why don't you be the one to steal?" "This is the Black Sun's business, by the way. Don't try to sneak in here and steal anything." The player tries again.

This time he's more polite, although he still is getting a headache. He gives some vague answers. "You're the one with the stuff," he says. "That's all I ask." "So what's the deal with you needing to sneak in to steal stuff, then?" "I gotta get in there to see what else this place has in store."

"Alright then," the player says. It doesn't work. The door isn't moving. "You're still gonna come in here, because you've got the stuff? What's your stake in this place anyway?" "I don't need the stuff. I want to see." "That's not the stake," the player says.

"You wanted to walk in and steal." "Yeah," the player says. "I know. I really want to steal."

It doesn't matter, not to him, not in the moment. He comes in, steps inside the Black Sun. The place is silent except for the click of the security door's lock and the muffled whine of the monorail as it pulls away. He can't see any exits. The Black Sun has only

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one door, just the door that leads to the Black Sun, which has been made of blackness and its name is "The Black Sun." It's like the building has already been abandoned. The player looks around. He can see some lights from the monorail, and, in one corner, a desk. It looks like work-related. Something rustles nearby. The player picks up a rock. That's when it hits him.

The Black Sun has a massive stockpile of drugs. "What the hell am I looking at here, anyway?" he says. "It's not the place!" he tells the NPCs, and they both look at him in surprise....

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Deliverable Animation (Physical Model) (Photography)

Software in use Blender Cinema 4D Houdini

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