Envisioning Cyberspace: Designing 3D Electronic Spaces,   ISBN:9780070016323

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Though a book of the 90's I have just used this book as a text in my course on virtual architecture in our computer graphics program. It worked superbly. The text stimulated long fruitful discussions (some for three unbroken hours) and put students in the state of mind to produce 3D based sites of significant meaning. Students took to heart Anders cautionary assessments on designing cyberspace and produced work that leapt well ahead of the work they were producing prior to the discussions. Anders chooses all of the best sources for his analysis of the similarities and contrasts between actual space and cyberspace, especially his use of Jean Piaget's interactional psychology as a base.

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Something that makes Peter Anders' _Envisioning Cyberspace_ especially interesting is that it's the work of an architect and designer, for whom the issues of designing workable, user-centered cyberenvironments are comprehensible. He's gathered and comments upon a wide-ranging collection of work that he finds interesting, efforts that approach and address the big issues if not always fully realizing them. It often reminds me of the 1991 anthology _Cyberspace: First Steps_ edited by Michael Benedikt (another architect), or some of the hot early-'90s books on Virtual Reality, in that it's full of enthusiasm and enjoyment at the elegance of possible solutions. In this hard-nosed commercially-driven era that's a breath of fresh air; the real kind, not the virtual.

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This is an extremely thorough introduction to cyberspaces and has many beautiful illustrations. This is an intellectually sophisticated book for non-computer scientists. It begins with a rigorous intellectual picture and then continues to survey existing cyberspaces with many insights along the way, that will please even techno-nerds.

The book fills in many details in the history of building cyberspaces.

Next year in cyberspace!

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The accelerating growth of personal computing over the past two decades and the unprecedented rise of the Internet in the 1990s has led to a countless number of books. Many deal with particular aspects of this revolution - linear historical accounts, analysis of emergent psycho-social phenomena, how-to manuals on the latest program or technology, etc.. Very few however, manage to capture a broad overview and comprehensive analysis of this explosion. Fewer still have documented the wide array of less common technologies and research efforts that have accompanied and in many cases, presaged, the more familiar aspects of today's cyberspace.

It's not surprising then, that a uniquely comprehensive view should come from a member of the original generalist profession - architecture. In "ENVISIONING CYBERSPACE: Designing 3D Electronic Spaces," architect and media theorist, Peter Anders has succeeded in delivering one of the best and rarest overviews of the beginnings of the Information Age.

Integrity demands that I disclose that some of my own work is featured in this book, but what I discovered to my great surprise and delight, is that it's also filled with many incredible technologies and ideas that I was unaware of. Such is the difficulty in being aware of everything that's going on in our rapidly evolving era.

Anyone interested or involved in the design and development of information technologies would do well to read this book. The future is not limited to just a simple extrapolation of what's most commonly known today. The real Information Age is a vast, barely explored region of possibility around us and ahead. We're lucky to have Peter Anders serving as both Lewis and Clark.