Virtual Egyptian Temple
At the center of every flourishing ancient Egyptian community, there was a sacred temple, the House of the Divinity. This Establishment (Sacred Corporation) was a model for the Egyptian world, encompassing religion, government, daily life, and harmony between heaven and earth. The Virtual Egyptian Temple does not represent any particular site, but embodies the key elements of a New Kingdom temple. It is built from respected sources and intended to for all ages' curricula in history, archeology, religion, and culture. The temple itself and all supporting materials are free to the public for all uses, as described in the end-user license agreement in the installation package.
The Virtual Egyptian Temple is now showing at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh for educational tours and is on the rotation of regular shows. tours, such as children's school groups. Click on the image, above, for closeups of the temple.
We are currently making a number of improvements: (1) a new model for the temple lighting. Click the image above for more screenshots and a fly-through movie (2) virtual objects for the Temple, many of which duplicate physical objects in the Walton Hall of Egyptology also at the Carnegie Museum (3) walls painted with the appropriate colors, and (4) incoporating ambient music composed for the temple. Click here for a sample.
The temple runs on a standard PC or Mac with at least a 1-ghz processor and 256K of video RAM on a game-graphics oriented video card. Most desktop computers today are entirely adequate. The temple also requires an installed copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 UT2004 is out of print, but generally avialable through eBay and second-hand venues. Then download the 54MB installation package file, VirtualEgyptianTemple123b.zip, open it, and follow the directions in the README.TXT file.
Read the book which provides background information on the temple. It is a bridge for the reader from the temple itself to more general information about ancient Egyptian life and culture.
Read the paper: Jacobson, J., Holden, L. (2005e). The Virtual Egyptian Temple. World Conference on Educational Media, Hypermedia & Telecommunications (ED-MEDIA), Montreal, Canada, June-July, 2005. PDF
Project History & VRML: 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. We used the first version of World Toolkit on an IBM 486, which had one of the first graphics acellerator cards ever made. Later, we rebuilt the temple in VRML format. To view the temple, install a VRML plug-in for your web browser. For the PC, we 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. Once your VRML viewer is installed, download the whole thing as a ZIPfile.