M.I.T. Department of Urban Design and Planning I met with Professor William J Mitchell at the Centre for Urban Design and Planning at M.I.T. Bill has recently written a book about the symbiotic relationship between urban planning and electronic communication technology called City of Bits, which is available on the net. We spoke about my Masters project and ways in which RMIT and M.I.T. might make best use of the internet for ongoing collaborative activity. Through Bill, I met the following people at the famous Media Lab, the director of whom is Nicholas Negroponte. M.I.T. Media Lab www.media.mit.edu Brygg Ullmer is working on Spatialising Web content, using urban planning as a metaphor. His inspiration includes "Snow Crash" the seminal Cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. He and talked about the finer points of the internet as a massive city with specific navigation needs. David Small's work investigates typography which can be manipulated in 3D. David Showed me a range of his projects, including this fly through text environment which lets the user see written information oriented on different planes. This provides contexts not possible using traditional 2D views, linked as they are to the limits of flat media like paper and screens. At the Media Lab I met Steve Mann, who is a long time researcher into wearable computing. Wearing your computer means you never have to be in one place to keep in contact with people via the net. You can log onto Steve's webcam attached to his head mounted display at any time (if he is wearing it) if not you can see the last thing he saw when wearing his system. 7

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