SCIENCE

The largest touring exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls and related artifacts ever seen in the United States arrives today at the Gulf Coast Exploreum science center in Mobile, Ala. Part of the Exploreum's Gala Opening tonight is the unveiling of the Exploreum's brand new Virtual Journeys Immersive Theater, powered by a visualization system from Silicon Graphics. Virtual Journeys will allow visitors at this and future exhibits to experience and interact with scientific discoveries using the same SGI technology that leading researchers around the world depend on for groundbreaking innovations in all areas of science. To further enhance the public's experience of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, the Virtual Journeys Immersive Theater features a guided interactive tour of the reconstructed Herodian Temple Mount in Jerusalem as it existed 2000 years ago. Starting tomorrow, January 21, the general public can visit the 50-seat theater, which will hold four screenings an hour and will highlight the archeology, history and religious significance of the temple. Using the SGI Reality Center facility, an Exploreum facilitator will encourage questions and interaction from the audience. The facilitator acts as tour guide and, with just a click of the mouse in the Reality Center facility, can take the audience, based on their areas of interest, just about anywhere they may want to go within the Temple Mount real-time visual simulation model. The data set even includes differing opinions on the archaeological finds, which can be pointed out both visually and verbally during the presentation. "I truly believe museums with interactive SGI Reality Center environments are going to become the museums of the future. In medicine, in biochemistry, in so many different areas, what you can teach in this room is phenomenal -- totally limitless," said W. Michael Sullivan, Exploreum Director. "I'm very bullish on the future and on the idea that we'll be doing things in this theatre 10 years from now that we haven't even thought of yet. In education, in science, in art, the Reality Center facility has terrific possibilities. There isn't an archeological monument in the world that couldn't use this technology." At the Exploreum, visiting students and the general public first enter the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit gallery featuring 12 large scrolls and artifacts from the Qumran site where the scrolls may have originated. The exhibit includes a fragment of a scroll containing passages from the Deuteronomy chapter of the Hebrew and Christian Bible-the only scroll in existence with the entire text of the Ten Commandments. In the Exploreum's upstairs Minds-On Hall, visitors can view and participate in various interactive experiments including DNA testing and radio-carbon dating of the preserved animal skin scrolls. They can then proceed to the approximately 2,000 sq. foot Virtual Journeys Immersive Theater for the 8 to 9 minute interactive presentation. "Interactivity, or 'science in action,' is considered the future of science education by many in the field," noted Sullivan. "The combination of education and entertainment makes science immediately interesting in a way textbooks cannot. And now, with Virtual Journeys, we have added the visualization element, which is how real science is conducted today. We have the SGI Onyx system behind a glass wall so visitors can actually see the computer that provides this incredible learning experience." The Exploreum's Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition coupled with the Temple Mount virtual tour has generated 50,000 advance ticket sales and is currently slated to run through April 24, according to Sullivan. He credits the scrolls, considered to be the finest archeological find of the 20th century, and the SGI Reality Center presentation of the Temple Mount, re-created as Jesus experienced the Temple in his time, with the tremendous excitement the science center has generated. "We have five busses coming from a synagogue in Miami, plus many church groups, some as far away as Memphis, and Cincinnati, and many more schools, colleges and universities," said Sullivan. "Using the SGI Reality Center facility, we will take people through this journey in time and space. It's a marriage of the actual artifacts from Qumran with the virtual understanding of what it was like way back then, both from an architectural and historical point of view, and from the point of view of religion. We're showing a wonderful, really solid data set of the Temple Mount, which was developed jointly by the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA and the Israel Antiquities Authority. In test runs, we've been very impressed with the power and speed of the SGI technology; it's rock solid." The seven-year-old Gulf Coast Exploreum is the second science center in Alabama to open an interactive Immersive Theater powered by SGI through funding from NASA and administered by Sci-Quest in Huntsville. The interactive Immersive Theater concept was developed by Sci-Quest in Huntsville. The first interactive Immersive Theater, built around a Reality Center solution, opened at Sci-Quest in the spring of 2003. Since the NASA funding only covered the cost of the computer hardware and SGI Professional Services installation, Gulf Coast Exploreum received additional funding for the other components of the theater (everything from seating to fire extinguishers) from the Hearin- Chandler Foundation in Mobile. The Immersive Theater is officially called the Hearin-Chandler Virtual Journeys Digital Theater. "The total immersion and unprecedented realism offered by SGI Reality Center visualization solutions are changing the paradigm of what information science centers, planetariums and museums present and how they present it," said Afshad Mistri, director of marketing, science centers, SGI. "Gulf Coast Exploreum joins many of the world's leading interactive educational environments by offering a new level of exploration and understanding of the world, allowing visitors to experience unreachable places billions of light years away down to experiencing a DNA strand, all through the immersive and interactive capabilities of SGI Reality Center." Future Plans at Gulf Coast Exploreum Gulf Coast Exploreum installed an SGI Reality Center facility. powered by an 8-processor SGI Onyx visualization system with three SGI InfiniteReality3 graphics pipes. The data set is visualized through the Immersive Theater using three Barco 3D Galaxy DLP projectors that display images on a 120-degree curved screen, 13 feet high by 32 feet long, with a 16-foot radius. While the Temple Mount is a 2D data set, the Exploreum plans to utilize its membership in the Sci-Quest Immersive Theater Network this summer by showing 3D interactive data sets such as Cosmic Connections, Inside the Human Body, and Earth Journey, which are available as part of the Sci-Quest Immersive Theater Network. In addition to being a repository for Immersive Theater shows, the Sci-Quest Immersive Theater Network enables members to have collaborative shows, letting visitors interact and share the experience of a live, collaborative show at Immersive Theaters located anywhere in the world. Because the Immersive Theater is based on the SGI Reality Center solution, the Gulf Coast Exploreum can also utilize data sets from other museums and the Virtual Science Network, an international alliance of museums, science centers and research organizations, initiated by SGI, intended to transform leading scientific discoveries into compelling visual experiences for the general public.