Eternal Egypt Web site

For over five thousand years, from the dawn of the pharaohs to the modern era of independence, Egyptian culture has evoked a sense of almost inexpressible awe. By the fifth century BC, as the Greek historian Herodotus wrote, Egypt had "more wonders in it than any other country in the world," and provided "more works that defy description than any other place."

For the past three years, the Egyptian Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CultNat) and IBM have been working to bring the awe-inspiring experience of Egypt to the world through a project known as the Eternal Egypt. With the help of a $2.5 million grant of technology and expertise from IBM, the Eternal Egypt represents a unique partnership to use innovative IBM technologies and services to create an interactive, multimedia experience of Egyptian cultural artifacts, places and history for a global audience. This fantastic new Web site is running just fine at:
http://www.eternalegypt.org/

To visit it using the innovative multimedia technologies you must have installed in your machine the most recent versions of Macromedia Flash and Shockwave. If you have not yet these browser's plugins is not problem: jump to Eternal Egypt Web site, load a multimedia page and you will be invited to install Flash and Shockwave (it is for free and the install process is easy and smooth, in few minutes.

A little over one year since the 100th anniversary of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, anyone with access to the internet is now able to enter a three-dimensional reconstruction of Tutankhamun's tomb. The experience is only one small part of Eternal Egypt, which is accessible by handheld digital guides in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, by cell phone for visitors to the pyramids at Giza or the Luxor Temple in Upper Egypt, or through the Eternal Egypt web site.

The Eternal Egypt web site includes an unprecedented experience of high-resolution images, three-dimensional reconstructions of Egyptian monuments and antiquities, as well as virtually-reconstructed environments, panoramic images, and panoramic views of present-day Egypt captured by robotic cameras located from the top of Karnak Temple to the streets of Old Cairo. An innovative, interactive map and timeline will guide Eternal Egypt visitors through Egypt's cultural heritage, while a "context navigator" presents the complex relationships between objects, places and personalities of Egypt's past in a unique, web-like display.

The centerpiece of Eternal Egypt is a trilingual website which offers the most robust repository of information and media about Egyptian cultural history available on the web today. High-resolution two- and three-dimensional artifact scans, 360º panoramas of locations, annotated multimedia animations, virtually-reconstructed environments, and real-time photos from webcams are woven into a multi-epoch journey through the museum that is Egypt itself.

The website began as a concept, "Egypt Everywhere," which strove to highlight the major themes that run through the course of Egyptian history. Spanning periods, peoples, and cultures the website was envisioned to appeal to the sensibilities and interests of a global audience. To reflect this concept in the development of a look-and-feel for the site, and consequently all other aspects of the project, IBM conducted a global "call for entries" amongst the e-business Innovation Centers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, D.C., Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, and Vancouver. The most visually appealing aspects of these designs were taken as inputs for a truly globally-inspired look-and-feel for the entire Eternal Egypt project

Ease of use and diversity of options for interacting with the wealth of content characterize the advanced functionality available on the Eternal Egypt website. Organized primarily in "articles", small segments that cohere thematically and can be grouped into stories or tours, the content for the site is accessed in a variety of ways. Visitors can take a birds-eye view of the site by exploring content by type - artifacts, characters, and places - or by the multimedia which represents it. Visitors can think more geographically and explore the collections by the sites and museums which contain them. Or, information can be explored even more visually by moving around an interactive, zoomable map of Egypt. Visitors more interested in exploring chronological relationships between the elements of Egyptian culture can use an interactive timeline. For a truly impressive experience, the Connections function can be used to visualize the implicit and explicit relationships between the artifacts, places, and people. Connections allows the serendipity of thematic connections in Egyptian culture to be your guide through Eternal Egypt.

A dynamic media viewer enables easy interaction with the thousands of images and multimedia on the website. The viewer adapts to the media under consideration, allowing zooming for high-resolution two-dimensional images and greater manipulation of panoramic movies and virtual environments. The viewer itself is scalable so that monitors of varying sizes and resolutions can experience the most rich visual presentation of content. IBM Text-to-Speech technology enables spoken narration of the content throughout the website and nicely complements the viewer. As visitors explore a three-dimensional reconstruction of the lighthouse at Alexandria, for example, they can also be listening to the story of how this lighthouse came to be, in English, French, or Arabic.

Personalization features of the website include My Collection, a persistent "notebook" which allows the visitors to assemble their favorite elements from the site. These elements can be saved for later retrieval on the Digital Guide, allowing a truly multi-modal experience of the same content. For example, visitors can assemble their favorite objects in advance of a trip to Egypt for easy retrieval as a cell-phone based tour upon arrival. My Visit charts a visitor's progress through the website, allowing easy backtracking to precisely the elements that were viewed before. A guided tour of site functions, an interactive page-specific glossary, extensive help section, and a low-bandwidth version for different access speeds rounds out the site functionality that makes Eternal Egypt so special.

The Eternal Egypt site is served to its World Wide Web audience from a "farm" of IBM xSeries servers located at the IBM Global Services, Services Delivery site in Southbury, Connecticut, USA. This infrastructure runs on a Linux platform and has been designed to provide a secure, scaleable, and flexible environment, which makes it possible for the Eternal Egypt website to support millions of "hits" each day. Website metrics and intelligence are provided by IBM SurfAid Analytics.

About IBM

IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. The company has more than 300,000 employees and does business in more than 160 countries. At IBM, we strive to lead in the invention, development and manufacture of the industry's most advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, storage systems and microelectronics. We translate these advanced technologies into value for our customers through our professional solutions, services, and consulting businesses worldwide.

In addition to Eternal Egypt, IBM's Corporate Community Relations unit has provided innovative technology grants for two other outstanding museum projects.

An IBM initiative to demonstrate how technology can bring unique works of art to people around the world led to the creation of an award-winning web site for the State Hermitage Museum in Russia, where some of the world's most magnificent art treasures are exhibited. Launched with a U.S. $2 million technology grant, this partnership between IBM and the Hermitage illustrates the compelling power of leading edge technology in bringing artistic legacies of the past to life.

With another technology grant from IBM Corporate Community Relations, researchers from the IBM Thomas J.Watson Research Center, in collaboration with Jack Wasserman, Professor Emeritus at Temple University, have created a near-perfect digital replication of Michelangelo's Florentine Pieta and pioneered what is perhaps the most comprehensive research project ever conducted on a single work of art. In the process, IBM developed new 3-D imaging technology, which can now be applied to the problem of digitizing very large priceless artistic masterpieces or works of architecture.

More information about IBM can be found at http://www.ibm.com.

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