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IBM unlocks the gates to Beijing's Forbidden City
2008-10-11
The only way to get a true feel for the Forbidden City, the vast moated palace built 600 years ago for China's emperors, is to peer into its grand multi-eved halls, cross its expansive plazas and stroll through its surprisingly intimate private gardens.But for those unable to make it to central Beijing, US technology company IBM and the curators of what is now known as the Palace Museum will today unveil the next best thing: a virtual Forbidden City offering the kind of immersive and interactive online experience pioneered by multiplayer role-playing games such as Second Life. The virtual palace, accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a reasonably new computer, offers the chance to explore it in the guise of an online avatar, talk to other visitors via text messaging, join automated tours and take part in activities such as archery. Developers say the project, dubbed the "The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time" and accessible through the website www.beyondspaceandtime.org , is the first to apply the approaches pioneered by online games to an important heritage site. "The virtual world seemed the perfect approach for the Forbidden City . . . allowing you to tell the story of what happened there, while also allowing you to interact with others," says John Tolva, IBM's manager for the $3m (£1.7m), three-year project. The avatar-based approach means visitors navigate the palace as they would in real life - but they can also do more unusual things such as lifting buildings off their foundations to view them from different angles or straying into courtyards closed to tourists. Nevertheless, users are more constrained than they might be in a pure online game - no fighting, Second Life-style flying or virtual sex is allowed here. For IBM, the virtual palace is part of a series of philanthropic cultural projects involving the Vatican, Russia, Egypt and the US that bring it positive publicity and the chance to get what Mr Tolva calls "access to very intractable problems" with patent-generating solutions. The virtual Forbidden City will also be a showcase for IBM's enterprise applications, offering what it says is unprecedented capacity for visitors in a single space with easily expandible software architecture. Wu Hung, director of the Centre for the Art of East Asia and an adviser to the project, says he was impressed by the seriousness shown by IBM, which used actors to model the gait of palace inhabitants clad in the platform sandals of imperial fashion. Prof Wu, who lived within the palace's vermilion walls for much of the 1970s, particularly relishes how the virtual version allows appreciation of its smaller spaces. "It really opens a door between serious research, education and entertainment," he says. Hu Chui, director-general of the Information Department at the Palace Museum, the government arm charged with preserving the Forbidden City, says it welcomed the chance to tap IBM's technology. For Mr Hu, the virtual version will not only allow people who cannot visit the palace in person to experience its glories, but could also transform the experience of those who do join the crowds in Beijing flocking through its stately gates each day. Many emerge exhausted by the complex's sheer scale and its dazzling range of sights. Others miss tucked-away displays of priceless treasures, having concentrated on the grand but generally empty halls. So the palace is opening a hall equipped with computers offering access to the virtual version, which it hopes will help visitors orient themselves, plan their visit and pick out features of interest. True historical accuracy is, of course, never easy. Though built in the early 15th century under the Ming Dynasty, the virtual version is based on the Forbidden City as it currently survives - essentially the incarnation left by the 1644-1911 Manchu-ruled Qing Dynasty - and its interactive elements span the reigns of six Qing emperors. Though proud of what has been achieved, Mr Hu is rueful about the difficulties of truly representing an institution of extraordinary historical and cultural complexity. Even proper portrayal of costumes is fraught with problems, since some palace inhabitants wore scores of different robes throughout the year, each with its own symbolic significance. Virtual visitors can also freely cross the palace's central axis, in violation of one of the many rules that delineated status in imperial times. "For someone to directly cross the central axis would be certain death; that was the road of the emperor," Mr Hu says. "These rules may have been sometimes unreasonable, undemocratic and dictatorial, but they were a part of Chinese culture." Mr Hu regrets that time constraints meant that including executions of avatars guilty of such lese majeste was not possible. The same is true for the portrayal of the huge gatherings of officials that used to be held in front of the throne in the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Virtual participation would be a wonderful way to appreciate such events, but even IBM's cutting-edge technology and hard-working historical researchers could not manage to represent the ceremony in time. "We can only leave it for a later upgrade," Mr Hu says.
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