We suggest that the dramatically engaging mediation of an experience of place should be built in as a fundamental capability of a compelling and meaningful virtual environment (VE). Our main objective is to develop flexible interactive techniques that supply VE's with a coherent context and make the resulting `virtual place' available to the user in a dramatically engaging way.

Nearly forty years ago, Kevin Lynch (1960) described the environmental image in terms of five structural features: districts, edges, paths, nodes, and landmarks. Though the work has been much criticized, even by Lynch himself, it may provide a basis for a computational tool useful both in design and in research on spatial cognition. This paper revisits Lynch's responses to criticisms as a means of ascertaining the potential merit of the prototypical tool, called "WayMaker." In addressing Lynch's concerns about his own method and results, we see that WayMaker and tools like it may support Lynch's value of participatory design, while enabling extension of his efforts to understand how people think about the spaces they inhabit. The paper includes discussion of methods for research in spatial cognition and potential use of WayMaker within graphical environments supporting virtual communities.