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NEW VIRTUAL REALITY TOUR ADDED TO SUPREME COURT WEB SITE
EVANSTON, Ill. --- The Supreme Court will soon be in session, and thanks to another new Internet project by a Northwestern University political scientist, you can take a tour of the Court without ever leaving home.
The virtual reality tour is the latest addition to Jerry Goldman's Web site featuring voices of Supreme Court justices, past and present, announcing decisions on the most important constitutional cases of the land (http://court.it-services.nwu.edu/oyez/).
"With just a few clicks of your mouse, you can move from the left to right to get a full view of the Court's exterior or zoom in to take a closer look at its majestic columns, its wonderful bronze doors or the fine details of the exterior statuary," said Goldman, associate professor of political science at Northwestern. The tour can be found at (http://court.it-services.nwu.edu/oyez/tour/).
At this point, the virtual reality tour offers panoramic views of the exterior of the Supreme Court, the plaza and the entrance to the building. Eventually it will include the Court's Great Hall, conference room, the library, the ground floor exhibit area and the pressroom.
It was made possible by a technique called "Quick Time Virtual Reality." The images were first filmed by Dennis Glenn and Joe Germuska, academic technology specialists at Northwestern who took 16 separate images at each location to create the panoramic views.
Goldman keeps improving his popular Supreme Court site, "Oyez Oyez Oyez" and recently was awarded the 1997 Educom medal for his efforts. The award, which will be presented in October, honors his creative work developing technology-based programs to improve teaching and research in political science.
The site is a World Wide Web resource that links text, images, sound and video to present a searchable database on the Supreme Court. When complete, the database will contain hundreds of hours of oral arguments, video, summaries of more than 900 cases, and biographies of all 108 justices. Its funding comes from Northwestern University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation and the law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt.
"It is one thing to read Supreme Court arguments and opinions and another to hear the range of emotions that accompany them," said Goldman, who teaches courses on American government. "It stirs the imagination, for example, to hear Ruth Bader Ginsburg explaining complex matters in the recently decided VMI case in a relatively simple manner or to listen to Antonin Scalia's powerful and scornful dissent in Romer v. Evans."
Goldman has started to develop a related website to bring historically valuable audio materials to the WWW. "History and Politics Out Loud" includes: tapes from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library of President Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussing the Cuban missile crisis; recordings from the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library capturing Johnson's anguish over the United States' involvement in Viet Nam and Johnson's resistance to -- and then endorsement of -- the formation of the Warren Commission; and speeches by United States Secretary of State George C. Marshall and Sir Winston Churchill (http://oyez.nwu.edu/history-out-loud/).
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