The most famous world buildings, exotic, mysterious and enchanting places were, until just a few years ago, travel destinations accessible only to a privileged few who were able to travel. The Internet has changed that and brought the whole world to our doorstep, much more so than TV ever had. TV allows an educational and entertaining audio-visual presentation, but the Internet lets you interact and experience a place virtually.

If you haven’t been able to travel and see some of the world’s favorite destinations, here you can experience them in 3D. Just make sure your computer is configured properly. In some cases you may need to download additional plugins to be able to view the 3D presentations. You will find more info on configuration requirements on each page.

1. Sistine Chapel

   Sistine Chapel is the most famous chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope in Vatican City, and the location of Papal conclaves. It is famous for its architecture, evocative of Solomon’s Temple of the Old Testament, and decoration that has been frescoed throughout by the greatest Renaissance artists including Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, and Sandro Botticelli. This website provides a unique opportunity to experience, explore and admire the chapel from up close.

   

   Take a Virtual Tour of The Sistine Chapel

2. The Prophet’s Mosque

   Al-Masjid al-Nabawi, often called the Prophet’s Mosque, is a huge mosque situated in the city of al-Madinah, Saudi Arabia. As the final resting place of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, it is considered the second holiest site in The Prophet’s Mosque is the second holiest mosque in the world after al-Haram in Mecca. Built by Prophet Muhammad in 622 AD, next to the house where he settled after his journey to al-Madinah, the original mosque was an open-air building with a raised platform for the reading of the Qur’an. It was a rectangular enclosure of 30 m × 35 m (98 ft × 110 ft), built with palm trunks and mud walls, and accessed through three doors: Bab Rahmah to the south, Bab Jibril to the west and Bab al-Nisa’ to the east. The basic plan of the building has since been adopted in the building of other mosques throughout the world. On this website you can tour the Prophet’s Mosque and feel as if you are actually there.

   
   Take a Virtual Tour of The Prophet’s Mosque

3. The Forbidden City

   This website provides you with access to an immersive 3-dimensional virtual world where you can walk through the walls of The Forbidden City and explore those aspects of Chinese culture and history that have been kept away from the world.

   You can use the website to learn more about the project, and download the virtual tour of the Forbidden City. If you register to join the Beyond Space and Time community you will be able to participate in forum discussions and gain access to enhanced features in the Virtual Forbidden City.

   
   Take a Virtual Tour of The Forbidden City

4. Taj Mahal

   Taj Mahal, the “crown of buildings”, is located in Agra, India. It is one of the most impressive structures in the world, and the finest example of Mughal architecture, a style that combines elements from Persian, Islamic and Indian architectural styles.Built as a mausoleum by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, it is widely considered as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world that stands out as the symbol of eternal love. Here you can discover the virtual world of Taj Mahal.

   

   Take a Virtual Tour of The Taj Mahal

5. The Great Wall of China

   Built over more than two thousand years ago, with stone, wood, grass and earth, the Great Wall was the key to protecting agriculture and resisting cavalry of the Huns and other warrior tribes from the north.

   

   Take a Virtual Tour of The Great Wall of China
   

6. The Great Palace of Versailles

   Take a virtual tour of the Royal court and discover recent renovation of the castle. See the equestrian statue of King Louis XIV or the historical gate, and get more information on architecture and history.

   

   Take a Virtual Tour of The Palace of Versailles

7. Virtual Tours of Israel

   3Disrael.com is the home to Flash virtual tours gallery of Israel showcasing many attractions and events in a unique and original spherical virtual interactive experience. You can see Israel in all its glory, capture the  beautiful locations and attractions.

   

   Take a Virtual Tour of Israel

8. Easter Island

   This is one of the most isolated islands in the world. About 1200 years ago a double-hulled canoe filled with sea travelers from a distant culture landed on its shores. Over the centuries that followed a remarkable society emerged in isolation on the island. For reasons still unknown they began carving giant statues out of volcanic rock. These huge relics, known as “moai” are some of the most impressive ancient monuments ever discovered.

   The people of Easter Island called themselves the Rapa Nui. Science has learned much about the enigma of Easter Island and has put to rest some of the more bizarre theories, but questions and controversies remain. Explore this site to get the latest information on the island’s history and current research.

   

   Take a Virtual Tour of The Easter Island

9. The Eiffel Tower

   Here you can view the Eiffel Tower from any angle, navigating between the floors and in and out of the structure in 3D. Also available are great views of Paris from the Eiffel Tower.

   

   Take a Virtual Tour of The Eiffel Tower

10. AROUNDER – Virtual Reality Travel

    Arounder is a great online magazine that offers a vivid experience of what a city has to offer: historical cathedrals and works of art, museums featuring famous artists, local cafes and stores, breathtaking mountain-top views, quiet parks and gardens. Each issue contains a series of interesting panoramas giving you a full immersive view of the cities. Navigation is easy with Google maps of the city and surrounding area. Every issue also links to local merchants with virtual tours of hotels, restaurants, spas and stores.

    

    Visit AROUNDER

The making of this top list was a slow and gradual process that gave me a lot of pleasure. The ten websites listed here differ greatly in theme and structure, but one thing they do have in common is that they stand out with their amazing concept and design, stretching the limits of digital culture and internet art.

Having stumbled upon them while surfing the net, and being the obsessive label-er that I am, the only tag I could think of was “fascinating”. And that is big coming from someone who doesn’t get fascinated easily. So naturally, I made a new folder in my Favorites, titled “Fascinating”, and decided I was going to publish this list the moment it gets 10 entries. That moment, dear friends, has arrived. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Oh, and by the way, most of these websites are built with rich flash animation, so make sure you have fast internet connection when you check them out.

1. 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein

   Designed by David Clark, this website is an interactive collage of philosophy and art, a poetic film based on the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, an influential Austrian philosopher. Based on 88 interactive flash animations that correspond to 88 constellations of the sky, this is a map of coincidence and relativity through which you can navigate and explore the poetic narratives that play with free associations. It is a story of Wittgenstein’s life told in fragments, and brought to life in contemporary digital culture.

   

   88 Constellations

2. A is for Apple

   This is another creation of internet artist David Clark, and similar in that it is also a collage of interactive fragments, a mind map of clues that signal a mystery that may or may not be there. All I know is that the search itself is worth the time.

   

   A is for Apple

3. CONCEPD

   Concepd is much more than a website. It is meant to be a “websight”, providing the user with a totally visual experience, a journey for the mind and the eye, spread between digital and physical worlds.

   

   Concepd

4. We Choose the Moon

   If you were ever curious about space travel, here is your chance to experience it in real time. This is an ambitious online project backed by the Space Program of John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The website is divided into 11 stages containing animation, archival photos, video and mission audio that bring Apollo 11 to life.

   

   Click here to view the video on YouTube.

   We Choose the Moon

5. The Turn

   Designed by Fredo Viola, New York based multimedia artist, this is an extensive interactive collection of his music and video art work.  It is a blending of 21st-century electronics and the human voice presented via multimedia visuals. For a quick preview of Fredo Viola’s work, see this clip.

   The Turn

6. 99 Rooms

   99Rooms is a unique internet art project that interweaves wall painting, photography, animation and sound, made by Kim Koester, Richard Schumann, Stephan Schulz and Johannes Buenemann. It will take you on a journey through 99 hauntingly beautiful rooms, all set on vacated premises of East Berlin’s industrial zone.

   

   99 Rooms

7. Kubrick 2001: The Space Odyssey Explained

   Kubrick’s Space Odyssey 2001 is a cult movie, probably one of the highest regarded films ever made. If you are one of its many fans, you will love this website. It is an interactive multimedia presentation that aims to explain the meanings of the four parts of the film. Available in many languages.

   

   Kubrick 2001: The Space Odyssey Explained

8. OnProduction Melody Sphere

   Music lovers will love this fun website. It is a retro futuristic project for the OnProduction company in Russia. In essence, it is an innovative, interactive  flash game that lets you play and create music online.

   
   OnProduction Melody Sphere

9. 31fps

   31fps is the digital playground of award winning interaction designer and artist Andreas Rothaug. Explore the links, they offer a selection of rich, captivating and truly unique experiences.

   31fps

10. Superpositions

    Superpositions is an interactive audio-visual collage made with night tripping, urban explorations, cycle machines… Created by Remy Rivoire, Renaud Vercey, and Bruno Voillot, it is a virtual journey based on random games and  clues. The interaction can be very dynamic or contemplative, both attitudes generating a distinct perception, a new sound, a new picture.

    
    Superpositions

If anyone’s got more gems to add to this collection, please feel free to post the links in the comments. Thanks.

Technorati Tags: web-art, web design, internet art, digital art, flash, web 2.0, fascinating, interactive, amazing

Listed here are the top ten interactive websites that are bound to suck you in with their addictive content. They are unique examples of contemporary internet art based on user interaction, and distinct from games in that there is no goal or win conditioning. One could contextually refer to them as “time-wasters”, but that would be an insult to digital art. I don’t know… Time-wasters or art, you be the judge.

1. Medijate

   Organic green spirit digital work by Larry Carlson, an American multimedia artist. Whichever way you click, you’ll be taken on a mesmerizing, psychedelic ride through the universe of Virtual Om. Enjoy it.

   
   Medijate

2. Feed the Head

   Feed the Head, created by Vector Park, has been around for some time, and it stands for a piece of interactive entertainment of a type we don’t often see. It is more a digital interactive art installation than a game.  It’s just plain fun to play. A piece of interactive art to be explored at your own pace. Spend a couple minutes or an hour. Lose yourself. Feed your head. Escape. Click.

   
   Feed the Head

3. Flow

   Created by Han Hoogerbrugge, a Dutch digital artist known for his unique and eye-catching animation style so representative of MTV media era. Flow is an interactive tale of a contemporary man and his travels trough the landscapes of our time. Sometimes he goes up, sometimes he goes down. By the guidance of the frantic music from Gil Kay, we see the man struggle with faith and religion, sport and health care, stress, the power of medicine, gambling, death, identity, free floating and an eye-ball. It’s an interactive extravaganza.

   
   Flow

4. Spin

   Another creation by Han Hoogerbrugge, designed for Sony/Playstation. The concept centers on the idea that PlayStation 2 is a gateway to another world – the Third Place. This is a mental or spiritual place, which can’t be defined as it’s different for everyone. No one can tell you about your Third Place, you have to discover it for yourself. It is about exploration, discovery and adrenaline. Neither inside nor outside, not waking nor sleeping, here nor there – it is what you make it. The presentation undergoes constant mutation through use/play, and the impossible becomes possible.

   
   Spin

5. Yenz

   This site, created by German designer Jens Schmidt, was born from a ‘wish to create a webpage which allows things which are not usual for the Web, such as full-screen animations and big images, without the problem of bad Web resolution’. As you enter you will find there are many ways to explore and play.

   
   Yenz

6. This Sand

   Designed by Johanna Lundberg and Jenna Sutela in collaboration with the Flash programmer Timo Koro, this website is a playground of colours and sound for people to play with. It is a sandbox – within the computer screen. With a simple click of the mouse, you can change the pixels on the screen into digital sand that can be used as building material for cosmic landscapes, Clemens-style sand paintings, mandalas and so on. Sometimes the resulting pieces are expressive, sometimes they become more abstract. And just as a real world sandbox, the digital one can be smoothed out and re-sculpted again time after time.

   Just like the actual sand gets its colour from its origins, the sand used on thisissand.com covers the RGB palette natural to digital environments. Also the sounds of the falling sand on thisissand.com resemble a real life phenomenon: singing sand is discovered in about 35 desert locations around the world where the wind triggers a low-pitch sound in the natural sand. Instead of nature’s frequencies the digital sand generates white noise, which is a random signal with a flat power density. It is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies – like the RGB sand on thisissand.com.

   The specialities of the digital sand lie in the possibility of saving the original pieces of sand art in the gallery or printing them out.

   
   ThisSand

7. Kaleidoscope

   A great online time-waster, virtual kaleidoscope was created by Ze Frank, an American web designer who likes to combine technology and art in his work. Remember the awe you felt the first time you looked through the kaleidoscope lens? The virtual version is more addictive and it works without holding it up and pointing it towards the light. Just drag the shapes and colors onto the rotating wedge and you’ll see the kaleidoscopic patterns appear in color.

   
   Kaleidoscope

8. Glitch Scape

   This is a very interesting experimental web musical instrument designed and programmed by Tomasz Slawnikowski. It is an interactive sound-vision generator that allows the user to create music with a simple click of the mouse marking the pixels to make visual patterns on screen.

   
   Glitch Scape

9. Dream Lines

   Dreamlines is a non-linear, interactive visual experience, a project by Leonardo Solaas. The user enters one or more words that define the subject of a dream he would like to dream. The system looks in the Web for images related to those words, and takes them as input to generate an ambiguous painting, in perpetual change, where elements fuse into one another, in a process analogous to memory and free association. The pictures are never actually shown. The drawing itself is produced by 1500 autonomous particles in perpetual movement. The last image loaded serves as a sort of virtual terrain for them. The direction and speed of each particle is given, at each step, by the color values of the pixel they are stepping on. Different sets of formulas translate the hue, saturation and brightness of the pixel in angle and velocity values for the particle. The path of each particle is traced to the screen, and this forms the output seen by the user.

   Thus, the work is at the same time a study on population dynamics, or on the emergent behavior of a multitude of very simple autonomous agents. Who is dreaming? The user, or the Internet itself? In a certain way, both. The program generates a personal moving picture, unique, unpredictable, and forever gone when it is finished, just like dreams. But that dream is made out of pieces taken form the subconscious of the whole net, gathered by some words of the user and the obscure logic of searching algorithms.

   The subject of this work is, many times, multiplicity. That of the particles in endless movement, that of the vast contents of the Internet, that of the users and the dreams they wish to dream. All this multiplicities get together on the verge of chaos, on a process that mixes randomness and strict but complex logics, very much alike the processes that take place in our heads. Even when we rest.

   
   Dream Lines

10. Celestia

    Celestia is an amazing free space simulation that lets you see the universe in three dimensions. The exponential zoom feature allows the user to explore space across a huge range of scales seamlessly. A ‘point-and-go-to’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

    

    Click here to view the video on YouTube.

    Celestia

Technorati Tags: time-wasters, internet art, web design, digital art, games, online games, interactive, virtual, web 2.0