Fortunately, that exhibit’s ticket also granted access to the main wings of the museum. One of the most impressive things about The Tech Museum is the level of interactivity they offer with the exhibits outside their physical space through Tech-Tags. The Tech Tag is a barcode on your ticket that allows you to preserve most of your interactive experiences in a personal digital archive online. In addition to allowing you to keep track of some amazing award winning exhibits, the TechTag allows visitors to keep some digital images. One of them is this goofy panorama of Delia and me in the Virtual Test Zone:

Another incredible imaging device TheTech has in their collection is the Cyberware Model PS Head & Face Color 3D Scanner. Astoundingly the museum lets you sit in a $70,000+ machine and take as many scans of your head & neck as you want. The applications of having a high resolution laser scan of your face are pretty amazing. With this data, one could in theory generate future prosthesis in the event of a bad accident. Better yet, the genealogical benefits of having this level of detail are mind blowing; imagine if you had one of these for your great-grandparents?!

To view this 3D VRML file, please Cortona VRML Client installed. It is available for free download from Parallel Graphics

This 3D scan is alone worth the price of admission, but there was one more image that we got that TheTech decided to not archive digitally, but instead handed out on old fashioned paper. The Robot Tech exhibit of their Innovation Gallery had a one-armed Robo-Artist busy drawing images much like a Etch-a-Sketch. Delia & I sat down for a few portraits, but settled to send only one to the robot. I think it’s one of the coolest portraits I’ve ever seen