MIT Building NE43 Virtual Tour

This is the starting point for an interactive tour of one of MIT's buildings, known as NE43. It is not actually on MIT property, but is leased by MIT for the use of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab), the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), and the Leg Laboratory. Its actual address is

545 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139.

The floorplans for each floor of this building can be viewed by following the appropriate link. Note, however, that the only location that you can actually tour at this time is the "playroom" on the 8th floor. As more areas are videotaped and digitized, I will make a note of it on this page.

Before you can tour anything at all, you will need to download the software from ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/projects/vtour. You will need both the modified Tcl/Tk interpreter wish_warp and the script file virt. You will then need to add the following line to the file .mailcap in your home directory:
application/vtour; /usr/local/bin/virt %s
This assumes that virt has been installed in the directory /usr/local/bin. If this is not the case on your system, modify the above line in your .mailcap file to match the location where it has been installed. Once all this is set up, try it out by following the link to the 8th floor and clicking on the large open area near the right side of the floorplan (called the lounge in the image).

The files in the directory /pub/projects/vtour/images that end in .vt[1-4] are the panoramic images the tour program uses to simulate a tour of that space. You may download them from here, or use the interactive links from this page to tour different locations. The names of the panoramic images indicate both the location, as well as the quality level of that image. Level 1 is the fastest, and lowest quality, as well as being somewhat smaller than the other images. Level 2 is full size, but still at a low quality level. Level 3 is fine for virtually all users, and level 4 has slightly better quality at the expense of having a file size nearly three times larger than level 3.


Please choose a floor to visit:


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Wesley Hildebrandt -- tiarna@ai.mit.edu