We propose a virtual tour of the ancient Greek city of Miletus. The Foundation for the Hellenic World has modeled the city for display on the ImmersaDesk and ReaCTOR at their museum. The existing application allows visitors to fly through the city and see it as it existed in antiquity. We intend to expand the application to demonstrate possibilities for networking of virtual museum environments. The most basic feature will be the sharing of the environment - people at far separated sites in the same virtual environment; these people could all be visitors, or one or more could be experts serving as guides for the others. Beyond this, we plan to add pre-recorded guides which are stored at one site and can be called upon by any visitors to lead them through the city and explain it, rather than requiring a human guide at all times; these guides will also be able to support multiple languages and levels of expertise for the visitors (we would expect to have the guides speak both English and Greek, and hopefully Japanese).
The application will require a CAVE or ImmersaDesk and Onyx2 IR; the full model is very heavy and unlikely to run on anything less than an Onyx2. We would like to be able to network to Athens, but won't be dependent on that; the primary remote site will probably be EVL. Bandwidth requirements are unknown at this point; if we share models over the network, that should be a large transfer only at the start of the application; during the rest of the demo the load should be equivalent to a few avatar and audio connections.
Miletus in the FHW ReaCTOR