![]() ![]() ![]() The environment will morph architecturally and of course the storylines embedded in the world will correspond to the historical moment. We envision being able to move between a few discrete historical moments in the centuries-long evolution of the city. There’s an historical aspect too: that’s the beyond time part. Call it the sidewalk approach to cultural heritage. The museum is a city and the best way to experience a city is by moving through it and interacting with others in it. This is the primary reason that our virtual version is a spatial world rather than a more traditional web front end (however tricked out) for a database of media, as we did with the Hermitage and Eternal Egypt. In fact, the buildings and grounds (and of course the artifacts therein) are the Palace Museum it is not a single building with nice glass cases and wall placards. It is sometimes said that people who visit the real Forbidden City leave thinking that they’ve missed the actual Palace Museum. Second Life is an inspiration and even a development sandbox for us (no SLURL, we’re on a private island for now - but we did recently take a SL team portait), but we’re evaluating many platform possibilities. If you know Second Life, you’re familiar with non-game-based 3D virtual communities. Though 3D representation is widespread in the field of cultural heritage (primarily for preservation), this kind of multi-user, education-focused cultural worlds does not exist. We call it a Participatory Cultural Environment to stress the importance of a space alive with people - other visitors who you can interact with and, if possible, computer-controlled representations of historic persons. And not just pretty building models to ogle at. This is not a set of traditional webpages but rather a fully immersive, spatial, populated world that corresponds architecturally and historically to the vast grounds of the current Palace Museum. The heart of Beyond Space and Time is a virtual online replica of the Forbidden City. But you have to start somewhere, so here’s the vision. The paper even gave Ascent Stage some love.īut what is Beyond Space and Time? Well, announcements like this at the beginning of a project are always tricky since it is the nature of multi-year, first-of-a-kind efforts to change drastically from vision to implementation. The Chicago Sun-Times decided to take the local angle on the announcement and ran a flattering piece on me and my team. So, what’s the project? Well there’s the official press release and the Palace Museum’s statement (in Chinese). Not that I’ll be diving into excruciating detail in future posts - gotta save some surprises for the actual launch in 2008, right? - but it should give a bit more context to my musings. Consistent readers of this blog (yes, you three) know that I spend a lot of time in China and so it is a great relief that the cat is officially out of the bag. ![]() Outside the wall is a 52 meters wide moat.Yesterday in Beijing, China’s Palace Museum and IBM jointly announced The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time, the project that I’ve been working on for over a year. The Forbidden City is built in a square shape, and the inner city is surrounded by 10 m high, 3400 m long wall. There is a strict and orderly layout.Īt the four corners of the Forbidden City lay delicate and exquisite turrets which were for observation and defense. The inner court consists of the Hall of Celestial Purity, the Hall of Celestial and Terrestrial Union and Hall of Terrestrial Tranquility and the six rooms on the east and west for its two wings. The outer court consists of Hall of Supreme Harmony, Hall of Central Harmony and Hall of Preserve as the three main halls, Wenhua Hall and Wuying Hall are the two wings. These rooms can be divided into two parts - the outer court and inner court. Rooms on both sides of the axis are symmetric distribution of many palaces do not lack magnificence. The three main halls, the imperial harems and the imperial garden are all situated on this central axis. There is an axis that runs through the Forbidden City and this represents the royal supremacy. According to the theory of ancient Chinese astrology, the location of the palace is in transit, regarded as the Celestial Emperor, corresponding to heaven. ![]()
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