Can’t afford a ticket to China to go visit the Forbidden City? Well, now all you need is your computer. IBM, which is a big believer in virtual worlds, and China’s Palace Museum have created an exact replica of the 178-acre Forbidden City. After working meticulously for three years to recreate every building and thousands of major artifacts, the virtual Forbidden City is now available for download (for Windows, Mac, or Linux). It’s free, although, I warn you the Mac version, at least, is a massive 275MB file.
Once inside, you can choose an avatar, dress him or her up in Qing Dynasty-era robes, take virtual tours, play Go with computer-controlled characters, call up maps, explore buildings and objects that allow you to click for deeper information. The virtual world was built on a gaming platform from Garage Games called Torque. ( I guess OpenSim wasn’t good enough. No word on whether it will be interoperable with Second Life)
So if you are looking for somewhere to weather out the current financial storm, but don’t have any money to actually go anywhere, you can spend hours roaming IBM’s virtual Forbidden City.
Great!!!!!
if you stage a virtual protest will you get thrown out by virtual guards?
So clever, so very clever.
In other news, good to see there’s something else out there that doesn’t revolve around the iPhone or Twitter.
lol
looks good sound good but is IBM into virtual worlds and games?
IBM is into selling computing power, which is what massive virtual worlds require as they scale up.
BTW the Torque engine was used a few years ago to build the Tribes II game, which was one of the best, multi-player first person shooters. I’d like to see someone mod the forbidden city with some forbidden weapons.
Yes IBM is into virtual worlds.
Well I have been their metaverse evangelist for the past 2 years and we have an awful lot going on.
Virtual worlds are about all sorts of things including social change inside the enterprise, offering richer human communication.
As for games, well you cant buy a next gen games console without buying an IBM chip, CCP(eve online) run on IBM machines, rockband backend does too, and Hoplon have a mainframe with a cell in it too.
Virtual worlds and metaverses are part of the future of the web, its way more than just one single thing. Its like asking if a tech company is bothered about the internet
A fantastic idea given the current financial climate. By quite literally bringing the location to the customer, even those with limited funding can experience wonders such as these. It will be interesting to see whether or not such technologies will become more common place over the coming years.
Wonderful display of technology –if we could separate this from the reality of a communist regime where the human rights of its citizens is too often worthless.
A ‘virtual’ world where everything is wonderful. The land of my ancestors. I still like the food, but no one in my family would even think of visiting,.. or [hell, no!] going back. Santa Monica is very comfy…
This looks cool – I think I’ll try this out this weekend…
Ninja sword-fights and this could be the game of the century.
Wow. I think considering the current economic climate, we’re going to see a huge surge in popularity on virtual worlds-not just because it’s cheaper than the real thing, but because it provides a very welcome escape.
What{s next? How about dine with Warren Buffet online?
Everyscape.com has a pretty neat tour of the forbidden city as well.
Real world get you down a long while ago. Great idea, great producing. Congratulation.
hmm, is it just me ? they invested 3 years into this to give away for free?
forget the free part, even if its for money, cant they do incremetnally. wat if after 3 yrs ppl went “yawn…”
There are still opportunities to make money from it. Perhaps they could charge for real time tours, or give users the ability to take photographs that produce the genuine image of the location.
IBM is a service and patent company. Pieces like this are advertisement for what they and their services and hardware can do. Plus patents get created out of these projects. They did this 4 years ago with http://www.eternalegypt.org
Are there Virtual Geishas?
Art VanDelay
http://www.show...ourthoughts.com
Geishas are in Japan, not China.
Does anyone know if the virtual reality program lets you explore the buildings and areas that remain off limits to tourists in the real Forbidden City?
Jeebus, some of the comments… Ninja swordfights? Geishas?
The Forbidden City is in *China*, guys. Not Japan. China.
Now, a virtual “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” swordfight, that I’d pay for.
这也和金融风暴扯上关系，汗…
不着调
That’s Funny.
It’s a good news for people can’t afford a ticket to China, a great idea.
Now why do i keep thinking SecondLife
http://www.qgo.co.za
quite a cool 3d application
Yes, its amazing, but while trying to meet up with someone else inside, we came to the conclusion that they must have multiple mirrors of the virtual forbidden city running, as we would each end up not seeing each other, tho we would (from our own perspective) be standing at the landing point. using a chat program we described the names of characters arond us and fond we were both seeing a different set of usernames. So.. for a virtual world this kinds sucks. How are we suppose to create an inworld community with this setup?
A long way to go, anyway… Virtual worlds are still too far from the real.
That is pretty interesting. At least we can be sure that there is increasing interest in the virtual world space. The file is massive though.
Talking about virtually visiting places of interest, http://www.amazingworlds.com is way better.
Is there a StarBucks, just like in the real Forbidden City?
if you are both in the Virtual Forbidden City and can’t see each other, then search for your friend’s name and click the invite button from the search result row
On my PC does not work
appears something like: “A copy of the VFC is already running, exiting”
What is it?
PLZ someone help me!
uhh same for me it says already running a copy of vfc somethign something exiting