Eyewitness Virtual Reality: Earth Quest

Earth Quest teaches you about earth science, like how minerals are formed and what the tectonic plates are, and the museum is built inside a giant cavern. It feels like you’ve stumbled into an excavation site. The doorways are carved out of stone, and the exhibits about gemstones and ores are built into the rock walls. As you walk around, you can hear water dripping. Where an actual museum might have a famous sculpture or a dinosaur skeleton in the center of the room, this museum has the earth’s core, shrunken-down, sitting on a pedestal and lighting up its surroundings.

Owing to their art experience, all of Dorling Kindersley’s CD-ROMs look terrific, but Earth Quest is especially spectacular. The museum is monumental. Even though it has a small footprint, it thinks in terms of hulking earthworks and geography. There are a few side exhibits, like a Violent Earth pavilion about earthquakes and volcanoes, and they’re presented on the edge of cliffs overlooking giant expanses of the earth. The balcony of the Shaping the Earth exhibit overlooks a view that moves between mountains, deserts, valleys, and islands to illustrate land formation. This is a museum so enormous and grandiose that the planet itself is on display.