Online Books

The Computational Beauty of Nature is an interesting looking book with extensive free synopses online (via del.icio.us/lightcycle). Which reminds me that both John Frazer's An Evolutionary Architecture and The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants are now free to download.

TRANSMATERIAL by Blaine Brownell catalogues a wide range of exciting and interesting material developments. There are currently seven chapters available separately or as one PDF. Interfacial (materials which facilitate the interaction between physical and virtual worlds) includes a reference to the ARTHUR project which the VR group here at UCL play a large part in. The entire book is also available as an 11MB pdf. (via Anne Galloway at Purse Lip Square Jaw)

Other weblogs I like

I'll start the ball rolling by linking to the kind of weblog content I think we should be aspiring to. All these sites post high-quality stimulating content on a regular basis:

• cityofsound - "what information designers and information architects could learn from the way cities and buildings work, with particular reference points around adaptive design, architecture, interaction design, the user experiences around music and radio, emergence, new media colliding with old media, e-government - that sort of thing"


• rodcorp - "art, architecture, books, maps; how teams and systems work; politics; mobile world"


• things magazine - "founded in 1994 by a group of writers and historians based at the Victoria & Albert Museum/Royal College of Art in the belief that objects can open up new ways of understanding the world."


• angermann2 - "about AI, architecture, art, audio, brainstorm, cartography, computing, conference, default, ethnography, hacking, haptic, information design, location-awareness, mobile, mundane, retro, social, space-place, spatial, swarming, urban, walking, wearing, wi-fi, and stuff."


• coin-operated - Jonah Brucker-Cohen, "researcher, artist, and Ph.D. candidate in the Disruptive Design Team of the NTRG, Trinity College Dublin."


• Future Now - "emerging technologies, their social implications, and their possible future impacts. ... research and forecasting at the Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, CA."


• Blackbeltjones/work - "a blog about experience design, design matters and occasionally other stuff like tech, science and comicbooks."


• Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends - "How new technologies are modifying our way of life"


• Space and Culture - weblog for The International Journal of Social Spaces


• Julia Set - "a blog published by the Design and Technology Program at Parsons School of Design, a part of the New School University in New York City."


• -: pasta and vinegar :- - "A blog about CSCW, Place and Space Research, Urban Studies and Weird Stuff"


• networked_performance - "augmented reality, distributed performance, environmental theatre, pervasive play, immersive gaming, telepresence?...???"


• [Purse Lip Square Jaw] Anne Galloway - takes "mobilities, urbanisms and technological designs and weaves them together with the concept of play."


• we make money not art - future technology with a mobile/artistic/new-media slant


• Terra Nova - a collaborative weblog about virtual worlds

Comments are open, so you can suggest other sites that people who liked those sites might also like.

Welcome to the MSc VE weblog

Staff and students on the MSc Virtual Environments course here at the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies have often shared interesting links and information using internal systems (document management systems, and email). Here's an experimental outward-facing platform for people to use as they see fit.