Welcome To The Virtual Pilgrimage

A hard drive is coming to use computers to promote ancient culture. As more and more affluent Indians get marooned at their workstations, cutting-edge technology is set to bring the countrys heritage alive to a generation that is more at home with power lunches than parikramas.

Salvation will soon be just a click away if the New Delhi-based Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) has its way. The Centres ambitious project, `Cultural Informatics, seeks to make rare Indian manuscripts, paintings and visual art objects easily accessible to anyone who has a computer.

Assisted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the centre is set to launch the countrys first Website devoted to an in-depth analysis of cultural information. This will be followed by the release of a CD-ROM series which will provide an online tour of Indias monuments and other cultural sites. The idea is to utilise multimedia technology to create a wide variety of software packages that communicate cultural information, says an expert involved in the project.

The possibilities are endless. Prehistoric rock paintings in Madhya Pradesh, Jayadevas 12th century epic poem, the Gita Govinda, and numerous other landmarks in Indias cultural history will suddenly become available in something close to their original glory to an audience that might otherwise have had to remain content with hearing about them.

One of the most interesting aspects of Cultural Informatics is the walk-through virtual reality project, which promises to offer the ultimate in armchair travel. The project has identified the area of Thanjavur with the magnificent 900-odd years old Brhadisvara temple as a focus in the south, while cyber-tourists can walk in Krishnas footsteps in the legendary Vraja region in North India.

For the past two years, the IGNCAs multimedia lab in New Delhi has been painstakingly piecing together bits of digital recordings, culled from the Brhadisvara temple by leading history and archaeology experts. The purpose: to offer visitors an `instant hypermedia experience of the temple through the simple expedient of pulling on an immersive display system (IDS), a 3D headgear.

The centre took the help of Bangalore-based infotech company Tata Elxsi Ltd for virtually reconstructing the temple. Tata Elxsi provided both hardware and software tools, networking (ATM network) and systems integration.

The centres Kodak imaging workstation is also humming with activity as the staff races to record 700 catalogues of manuscripts and compile 1.25 lakh manuscripts in various Indian languages.

Apart from over 90,000 slides, obtained from museums and private collections the world over. Now, if only somebody would invent virtual work!