Reflexive Architecture, by Keystone Bouchard, Jon Brouchoud. Installation on Architecture Island and exhibition on Info Island for artslib, September 2007. Scripted by Fumon Kubo. Music by gurdonark, Restless Sleep.

You can watch this video as a dreamy machinima, but it’s really a demonstration of some potentially revolutionary technology. Created by SL-based architect Keystone Bouchard, it shows off a set of installations meant to expand the meaning of designing in 3D virtual spaces.

“In real life,” he explains, “architecture is relatively static and rigid. For the most part, the first generation of virtual architecture has been an attempt to import and recreate that sense of rigidity. However, virtual architecture has the capacity to be less like a solid artifact, and more fluid and dynamic like a liquid.” Working with Fumon Kubo, who wrote the core scripts, each installation enables “prims to change size, shape, color and, in some cases, play a sound as an avatar approaches. Each variable (distance, size, time, etc.) can be fine-tuned in the script to achieve the desired effect.)”

What can they be used for? Bouchard intentionally kept that abstract.

“I didn’t want to be literal in their purpose,” he tells me, “so that others can take these scripts and come up with their own derivatives and applied uses, toward a new language of virtual architecture.”

Because that’s the coolest part: Bouchard and Kubo have open sourced the scripts you’re watching in action here.

“Since the idea of responsive architecture isn’t new (we’re standing on the shoulders of giants),” he continues, “it only makes sense to keep these ideas open and public in order to help encourage ongoing development of the concept. Toward this end, we’ve open sourced the scripts under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license so that anyone can try them out and work toward their ongoing improvement, sharing their progress with the community.”

You can read more on the SL architecture blog here, here, and here. A direct SLURL teleport to the installation is at this link. (While we’re at it, read more about some of Bouchard’s other remarkable innovations here, here, and here.)

And while I’m not an architect, I can already see some powerful SL/RL applications in these videos. In it, for example, you see subtly glowing trails which indicate where avatars have walked. This would be a great way of designing walkways or paths, based on existing travel patterns. (In the real world, architect Christopher Alexander did this with grass. When his contractors wanted to know where they should install concretes sidewalks to link a building project under construction, he had them grow grass in the space. Months later, people going from building to building had naturally laid down trails in the grass — and these were where Alexander told his contractors to lay down the walkways.)

I mention that idea to Bouchard. “Definitely,” he says. “I’m also looking forward to exploring the potential for the ‘carvable architecture’ script for the same reason. Every time an avatar approaches, the wall sections move away just a tiny bit. Over time, popular spaces get larger. In this way, the movement and flow of avatars over time essentially ‘carves’ the architecture.” [blogged by Hamlet on New World Notes]