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.
Tours of the Virtual Egyptian Temple is a regular show at the
the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh. Click on
the image, above, for closeups of the temple.
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 papers:
Troche, J., Jacobson, J. (2010) An Exemplar of Ptolemaic Egyptian Temples. Computer Applications in Archaeology (CAA), Granada, Spain, April, 2010 PDF
Handron, K., Jacobson, J. (2010). Extending Physical Collections Into the Virtual Space of a Digital Dome, The 11th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage VAST (2010), A. Artusi, M. Joly-Parvex,G. Lucet, A. Ribes, and D. Pitzalis (Editors), Paris, France, September. PDF
Jacobson, J. (2010) Digital Dome Versus Desktop Computer in a Learning Game for Religious Architecture. Annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Denver, CO, April, 2010 PDF
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
World Toolkit: 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.
VRML: 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.
UT2004: 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, VirtualEgyptianTemple127.zip,
open it, and follow the directions in
the README.TXT file.
Unity:
Credits
