The Wired Campus reports about the project at the UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) aiming to explore the ancient Egyptian site of Karnak by using VR techniques.

Willeke Wenderish, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the named University has actually used modeling and virtual simulation to learn, and now present and explain, how the Egyptian religious center has evolved over two millennia. Her efforts are concretized in the online presentation named Digital Karnak.

Ms. Wenderish's opinion is, though virtual reality techniques are appreciated and increasingly popular in the field of archaeological studies, they are still underused. This is probably a consequence of high costs, she thinks. At the same time, she says she is working on other projects of the same kind, such as the exploration of the site of the Faiyum Oasis.

This is not the first time, though, that virtual reality is used to study and popularize archaeological issues. Remember Dassault Systemes' Kheops?