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Virtual/physical places
My suburban room could become a part of a newly defined net of physical and virtual rooms. It could be seen by a webcam and integrated into a place composed of a virtual meeting space plus my and my friends' physical rooms shared on wall-sized screens, through which we or our avatars could wander and interact. A scattered group of private teachers could create a hybrid "school" composed of some laboratories in physical space and classrooms in virtual space. Local physical shops could become part of a virtual mall. A local school or library or church could expand and connect into a larger shared virtual/physical facility. A world-wide task group could have an office composed jointly of their scattered local offices, visually and "spatially" linked and provided with additional virtual conference rooms. Whether created by television or by virtual reality, such discontinuous add-on places could enlarge possibilities for many institutions and individuals. They could overlay virtual real estate and new place grammars on existing buildings without the costs of physical construction, and, in the suburbs, without running afoul of the defenders of property values or a community's architectural controls.Such discontinuous places would still be defined more by their particular place grammars than by their peculiar spatiality. A mixed virtual/physical library would have more in common with an ordinary local library than it would with a mixed virtual/physical shopping mall.