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(from Wikipedia) The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the mid-Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in the middle of Beijing, China, and now houses the Palace Museum.

Built from 1406 to 1420, the complex consists of 980 surviving buildings with 8,707 bays of rooms[1] and covers 720,000 square metres. If you can’t visit it in person, you can now, thanks to a collaboration between IBM and the Chinese authorities take a virtual tour on your PC (Windows, Mac or Linux). The software is a largish install (over 200 MB for Windows) which installs the front end to a 3D world. if you register, you can take snapshots of the virtual world and email them as postcards.

This is not just running on your computer but you are in a virtual world and can interact with other visitors. You can just observe, take part in activities or follow a tour guide. I haven’t explored more than a fraction of the world but it installed easily, was easy to use and because there are lots of tour guides and it’s easy to lose yours, if you drift off it will pull you along.

When you run the software, you have to login and then wait about a minute while it downloads data. You get atmospheric music. Controls let you have different point of view,including zooming in and you can put notes (and your “photos”) into a scrapbook.

The default viewpoint is third person, ie seen from behind and movement but you can view yourself from above, or looking at yourself or a first person view. It takes quite a while to move about but if you view the detailed map you can click on places and instantly be there. There are activities such as helping an archer practise archery. You control the strength and direction etc.

As a piece of free educational software this is remarkable but note, you will need an Internet connection. Highly recommended.

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