Since they don't circle around a real or symbolic center, our places can be more discontinuous than classic places. Some new places even mix physical and virtual spaces.
Guillermo Vasquez de Valasco and David Hutchinson of Texas A&M's College of Architecture presented the Infinity Room, an experiment in collaborative design between remote participants. The Infinity Room allows Texas students to communicate live with colleagues in Mexico using a network of video cameras, projectors, and screens. Whereas conventional videoconferencing shows only the correspondents' heads, the Infinity Room projects full body images. Texas students "see" their Mexican counterparts as if they were actually in Texas, and vice versa. Since the viewers are present in each other's space, both parties perceive an overlap of spaces. This produces a hybrid of physical space and cyberspace -- or cybrid -- where both parties coexist. (Anders 2000, 49)
Some years back, the advertising agency Chiat-Day reconfigured its offices to eliminate permanent stations for employees, and developed a computer network that offered virtual places where employees could meet and talk. Employees met both in physical rooms and in the conferencing software's virtual place, which included manipulable icon pictures for each employee. Conferences, deliberations, and decisions happened across that mixture of real and virtual spaces, in which neither component was spatially continuous. During the time that arrangement was in effect, the Chiat-Day office was a place that was composed of a number of discontinuous physical and virtual areas. (The experiment did not work out very well, but what was created was still a new kind of place.)
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001