Building Virtual Worlds: A City Planning Perspective

Computing, networking and virtual reality technologies are gradually approaching the level of maturity where large scale multi-user virtual environments will be possible. This will inevitably lead to the development of large scale spaces for the on-line community to meet, socialise and carry out business. We might consider these environments to be virtual towns or, eventually, virtual cities which contain many of the features, and problems of their real world counterparts. This paper draws on literature from the disciplines city planning and architecture to raise some of the issues which may be important in the design, development and administration of these environments in order to make them pleasant, usable and manageable.