The latest edition of Designing Worlds (episode 73) was extraordinarily fact-filled, in my view. Of course, we always have quite a lot of information in our programmes, but our guests from Bristol University had a great deal to share with us about the Pompeii Court at the Sydenham Crystal Palace and their re-creation of it in Second Life. Do have a look at the show.

Gwendoline Beningborough and Lucien Krenfel have done a wonderful job here. The Crystal Palace was originally designed by Sir Joseph Paxton for the Hyde Park London, Great Exhibition of 1851. After the event, it was moved to Sydenham in South London, to the hilltop site of Penge Palace, overlooking London and re-opened in 1854.

Virtually everything in the reconstructed Palace was a fake - a re-creation, most of all the Fine Arts Courts which reconstructed aspects of life in faraway historical civilisations: Ancient Egypt, Greece and Mediæval England to name but three. Each court featured buildings and art from the region or period, reconstructed to the best of knowledge at the time.

Such it was with the Pompeii Court, which relied on excavations in Pompeii that had been going on for over a century. What the Victorians were creating was their own version of an "immersive environment". The so-called House of the Tragic Poet, recreated here, was the setting for Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 novel, The Last Days of Pompeii, and that became another reason for the crowds to flock to the Palace exhibit.

So, what happens when you re-create a recreation? In 1854, Londoners and those from further afield were exposed to the culture and art of an ancient Roman city, including that civilisation's open attitude to nudity, for example. Reviews of the time varied from appreciation to disgust. Now we come to the recreation, in our own virtual world, of this 19th-Century immersive environment and we bring a culture clash of our own. How do we see the Victorians seeing the Romans? Watch the show and find out - and do be sure to visit the site yourself. Read more at the web site: http://sydenhamcrystalpalace.wordpress.com/

Today on Designing Worlds we're visiting the four sims of Al Andalus in Second Life, and take a tour of some of the quite remarkable World Heritage sites recreated there, including the castle and palaces of the Alhambra. We'll also discover a little about the philosophy behind these SL regions.

The show begins at 2pm SLT (22:00 GMT) and you can watch live either in our studio at Northpoint, or here at the Treet.TV site - just click the "Watch LIVE" button.

In our latest show we visited Virtual Africa with Alanagh Recreant of Uthango. Alanagh gave us a very spirited tour of several of the main areas in the four-sim region and we all learned a great deal. I would encourage viewers to visit Virtual Africa themselves - there is a lot more there than we had time to show.

What we did cover, though, included some fascinating projects. In the first part of the show we heard about a fascinating projects to bring bicycles to a school. We went on to visit a recreation of a township (basically, a shanty-town) which is not yet open to the public and talked about Cape Town-based Uthango's development projects; and finally we visited a wildlife area where you can adopt a Meerkat. The show ended with us attempting to take a balloon ride - but we were so busy talking we nearly missed it! Alanagh was a wonderful host and was a fount of information.

We came away extremely impressed by Virtual Africa and also by Uthango's work in Africa in real life. Many, many thanks to Alanagh for showing and telling us so much.