This is a hypothetical Egyptian temple, built from respected sources. It is free to the public for educational and other non-commercial purposes. To use it, you will need a standard PC or Mac with these minimum specifications. Next, buy and install a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004. Then download the 35MB file, DM-Horus102i.zip, open it, and follow the directions in the README.TXT file. README.TXT also contains a long list of credits for the project.
The virtual Egyptian Temple is now showing at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh for group tours, such as children's school groups. We are especially grateful to the students at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, who have made the most recent contributions to the Temple.
READ THE BOOK. It provides background information on the temple. It is also a bridge for the reader from the temple itself to more, general, information about ancient Egyptian life and culture.
Jacobson, J., Holden, L. (2005e). The Virtual Egyptian Temple. World Conference on Educational Media, Hypermedia & Telecommunications (ED-MEDIA), Montreal, Canada, June-July, 2005. PDF
Gates of Horus is an interactive learning game based on a Virtual Egyptian Temple, described below. The student navigates the temple in a "first-person" view, where the view screen is made to look like a window onto the virtual world. The display can be a simple computer monitor or any CaveUT-based immersive display. In Jeffrey Jacobson's successful dissertation experiment (2008), students who played the game using immersive display learned more than those who used only a desktop display. You can read all about it in Jeffrey Jacobson's Dissertation. Warning! The dissertation is a 13-meg pdf file.
We built the first version of the temple in 1993, which opened at the Guggenheim in 1994 in an exhibit of artwork employing new technology and has been improved upon ever since. See the old credits page
. Most recently, Jason Yates rebuilt the VRML version, making it light and efficient. It is free to the public for educational and non-commercial purposes. To view the temple, you need to install a VRML plug-in for your web browser. For the PC, I recommend the free player at Octagon, but Cortona and BS Contact VRML work too. Mac users should definitely use Cortona. Linux users should try FreeWRL or OpenVRML Lookat. Once your VRML viewer is installed, simply click here, or download the whole thing as a ZIP file.
ART 62425 was an experimental interdisciplinary course offered through the Fine Arts Department of Carnegie Mellon university in Fall 2001. Students of all majors studied interactive media, ancient Egyptian history, information theory and teamwork. The instructors were Prof. Lowry Burgess, Dr. Lynn Holden and myself. Students worked in teams to produce several projects, which will soon be made available. The curriculum made use of a layered virtual environment, centered on the Temple of Horus at Edfu.