AM Radio's Great Grandfather

Most Second Life residents are familiar the work of AM Radio, creator of serenely captivating landscapes that brought a striking sense of scale to the virtual world. Only one of AM's builds now stands, a quarter-sim construction called The Far Away, but he remains actively creative in real life working as a graphic designer, ux designer, and lead programmer/developer of CityForward (a fascinating project by IBM), and as a photographer: his tumblr is replete with images that evoke the kinds of spaces and designs he created in Second Life (or perhaps it's the other way around).

Recently he posted a little personal project that struck me as an innovative use of Second Life: he needed to restore an old photograph of his great grandfather (and anyone who has attempted photo restoration knows how challenging this can be). Rather than use Photoshop to sketch out the wheel, he created a virtual wheel mirroring the original and then dropped it into the photo. As he says on his post, "The wheel needed some more exact work, so I used Second Life to model a wheel quickly to insert into the photo." If you want to see something really interesting, see how he then created a primitive 3d effect with the image (also applied to an image of Abraham Lincoln).

Images ©AM Radio, used with permission.