A new piece at Ars Technica explores the efforts of Stanford University's virtual worlds research group to create tools that will allow more people to participate in visual design for virtual worlds. This is essential, of course, as user-generated content is one of the big drivers behind virtual worlds proliferation, so why not equip as many people as possible to create rich 3D objects and spaces?

Ars Technica interviewed Stanford's professor Vladen Koltun about the research group's current proof-of-concept, Dryad, which is designed to let almost anyone add 3D trees to a virtual world by navigating a "tree space" that refines itself by user contribution (note: Dryads are tree nymphs, according to Greek mythology). The research team hopes the Dryad technology can eventually be built upon to let users build entire worlds.

Basically, it seems to work via a visual map of various trees, and as the user selects the group of trees most like the one he or she wants to create, the visual map zooms in on a group of increasingly similar trees, the difference in attributes becoming narrower and narrower according to the user's picks, until finally the user has one single tree according to his or her wishes.

From the article:

"So, why start with trees? 'We looked at work that was done in the US Army in the mid-90s—they went through tree manuals and encyclopedias and cataloged ways in which trees differ from each other,' said Koltun. 'We probably should have created 'the Stanford tree,' but instead we found a nice Christmas tree, which is the default tree that Dryad currently starts with.'

Ultimately, Koltun and his fellow researchers hope to produce a number of similar tools for other objects in order to allow anyone to contribute to the look and feel of virtual worlds. 'We want to ensure that users always have something in front of them and are not confronted with the daunting task of sculpting,' he said. As everything from games to entire communities move into user-generated virtual worlds, these tools should help ensure that limited design skills and artistic ability don't prevent anyone from shaping those worlds."

The technology has seriously interesting ramifications for human art, visual and social study, too -- wonder what it would mean if the research results found that users consistently chose one type of tree? There's often a lot of speculation around what drives users' choice of avatar -- it's as much self-fantasy as it is self-expression. If the same technology could be applied to face-picking, for example, how many faces would be the same?

[Ars Technica - Researchers Hope To Enable Crowdsourcing Of Virtual Worlds]