Telecom Italia Future Centre

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Continued from page 2

Archived article (2004)

ABOVE: Thatcher Imboden converses with an oracle in a talking well. INSET BELOW: Venice for Visitors makes a guest appearance on a monitor in the Future Centre's coffee house.

Museum exhibits

The Telecom Italia Future Centre's exhibits are mostly of the hands-on or interactive variety, not unlike what you might find at a science and technology museum back home.

When you arrive at the museum, you're given your own visitor's card, which looks like a credit card and has an embedded microchip. At each exhibit, you insert the "smart card" into an electronic reader like the red box in the photo above. This launches the interactive portion of the exhibit, which might be a spoken commentary, a video presentation, a computer game, or (as in the photo) the chance to get your horoscope or an oracle's pronouncements by having a two-way conversation with a talking well.

Some of the exhibits and services include:

• Venetian routes, where computer-generated 3D recreations of 15 characters such as Titian, Casanova, and Marco Polo talk to you and lead you on a virtual tour of the city. (You can even have the characters print out tourist guides to use after you've left the museum.)

• A stroll into tomorrow, which lets you experiment with recognition by touch, intelligent shopping, and other emerging technologies.

• A gaming area, which features individual and networked computer games.

• The water theatre, an art installation in San Salvador's ancient boathouse (a cavelike entrance with an iron gate that faces a canal).

• A coffee house with free Internet terminals where you can fetch your e-mail, check the news back home, or browse the Web. (During our visit, most of the people using the terminals were local citizens, not tourists.)

Next page: Visitor information