Envisioning 3D design systems for the Metaverse

• Make 3D content creation easier for everyone

The internet has evolved from a text-based world to 2D catalogues with images and videos, and will presumably move towards the 3D era — the metaverse. Every digital media era has spawned tools that users can easily produce, edit, and share content, so the general public can actively participate in content creation, such as photo and video editing apps on your phone.

Metaverse needs massive 3D content to engage the users, and 3D is expensive — to make, to understand, and to store. The production of 3D content is a painstaking task that is typically delegated to trained experts. Many authoring tools are expensive and have a steep learning curve. You might also need to learn programming and game engines. Each tool is huge and complex, but after learning all the tools, can users produce high-quality scenes?

• Empower users for quick 3D prototyping

I have seen a lot of emerging web-based 3D design software, which initially solved the problems of accessibility and real-time collaboration, but they just turned Microsoft Office into a web-based Google Doc. Users who don’t understand 3D design still don’t know where to start and how to build high-quality scenes. I think we can consider developing 3D version design systems, and craft building blocks and rules (relationships) so that users can build their own. This kind of building block not only includes spatial forms, materials, and shaders but also contains generation logic, interaction methods, and data interface with other modules. General users can generate 3D content by simply dragging and dropping and clicking. For users with some technical skills, we can provide them with development tools to allow them to customize and extend functions, or generate new modules. The independent game Townscraper, in my opinion, is a design system. The developers pre-set the modules of the medieval town and their rules. Users can quickly generate scenes by clicking, and the learning cost is basically zero.

• 3D design systems are about variety and community

Due to the richness of the three-dimensional world, the design system will inevitably be full of varieties, and it is unlikely to see that big tech standards dominate the market. We could have the gothic design system, cyberpunk design system, or specific traffic planning systems, vegetation systems, character systems. . . endless possibilities. If you develop a design system of your own style, it is possible to build a community, and then build a virtual world of your own.

Pattern theory

“A person with a pattern language does not need to be an “expert”. The expertise is in the language. He/she can contribute to planning and design because they know relevant patterns, how to combine them, and how the particular piece fits into the larger whole.” — Christopher Alexandar, A Pattern Language

When it comes to how to scale design, the first inspiration that popped into my mind is Christopher Alexander. He was an architect and design theorist that had affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology. Ironically, Alexander was considered controversial among some mainstream architects and critics in his own field, while his work gained greater recognition in other fields. In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of the pattern language movement. Alexander’s work has also influenced the development of agile software development.

Alexander is perhaps best known for his 1977 book A Pattern Language, with the intention to give ordinary people, not only professionals, a way to design nurturing environments and build at any scale. His book directly inspired Will Wright, the creator of the city-building simulation game SimCity, “I’m interested in the process and strategies for design. The architect Christopher Alexander, in his book A Pattern Language, formalized a lot of spatial relationships into a grammar for design. I’d really like to work toward a grammar for complex systems and present someone with tools for designing complex things.”

As A Pattern Language explains “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”

To UX designers, this concept sounds wonderfully familiar — it’s the basis of every design system. Design patterns are a universal resource to align best practices, describe the elements of good designs, and most importantly, provide a repository so that other people can easily reuse these solutions. Why invent the wheel when a perfectly good one already exists¹?

“Life” in the built environment

What are good designs and how to evaluate designs? Can we study “feelings” objectively? Alexander aims to create a scientific view of the world in which this concept —that everything has its degree of life—is well defined. In his later book The Nature of Order, Alexander attempts to define “life” in the built environment and determine why one built environment may have more life than another.

Sadly, he believes we no longer have the ability to produce “living structures” in the world, especially after World War II. Much modern architecture is inert and makes people feel dead inside. The “living structure” which is needed to sustain us and nurture us and which did exist to some degree in the traditional societies and in rural communities and early urban settlements has disappeared.

What went wrong, and how might architecture correct its course? Beginning with his design patterns, he discovered that the designs that stirred up the most feeling in people, what he called living structures, shared certain qualities. This wasn’t just a hunch, but a testable empirical theory, one that he validated and refined from the late 1970s until the turn of the century. He identified 15 qualities, each with a technical definition and many examples. As additions to the pattern theory, these 15 geometric properties appeared to exist recursively in space whenever buildings had life. These 15 properties seemed to define a more fundamental kind of stuff; similar to the patterns we mentioned earlier, but more condensed, more essential — some kind of stuff that all good patterns were made of².

The qualities are:

• Levels of scale
• Strong centers
• Boundaries
• Alternating repetition
• Positive space
• Good shape
• Local symmetries
• Deep interlocking and ambiguity
• Contrast gradients
• Roughness
• Echoes
• The void
• Simplicity and inner calm
• Not separateness

These 15 properties turned out to be a substrate of all patterns and began showing up more and more clearly in his works as the main correlates of living structures in places, buildings, things, space and so forth³.

Generation of a whole, living world

In Alexander’s view, a thing is not an isolated entity, but part of an interconnected whole. To learn how ‘good’ that thing is, it must be assessed holistically with respect to the context of that thing. For example, a room is a substructure of the building, which is a substructure of the street, which is a substructure of the city, which is a substructure of the country towards the entire Earth or the cosmos. On the other hand, that same room also contains far more small substructures than large ones at different levels of scale (or hierarchy). For example, a wall with a painting may further contain far more ‘smalls’ than ‘larges’. Therefore, the goodness of that room depends on its adjacent rooms and things, on the smaller things within that room, and on the larger thing (or the building) that contains that room. It is essentially a recursive definition of the goodness of a space⁴.

Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.

— — Philip Galanter

There are many well-established generative techniques, and each of them can be elaborated with endless paper and research. In this chapter, I will give a brief introduction to these concepts with examples in 3D content generation.

Randomness and noise

Using Randomness and noise is probably the oldest, simplest, and most common method of generative art. The artist uses various parameters to define a changing space, which can take values within a certain range, and the randomly selected value affects the manipulated elements to form the final work.

The basis of noise comes from random numbers. The characteristic of random numbers is that the value of each point is discrete and has nothing to do with each other, while noise makes discrete random numbers continuous.

There are different kinds of noise, like white, red, Perlin noise..etc. For more detail about noise theory, you can review this article:

Perlin noise is a procedural generation algorithm invented by Ken Perlin. It can be used to generate various effects with natural qualities, such as clouds, flame, terrain, landscapes, and patterned textures like marble. The algorithm can have to be implemented in different dimensions.

You can also play the noise-based generative biomes below, click randomize to create new ones or customize them yourself.