By Janos Gereben
Showing you the way to San Jose, there are new signs on the highways around the city, pointing to TheTech, or, in more explicit English, The Tech Museum of Innovation, which had its grand opening a few weekends ago. The mango-colored square building, with the watermelon cylinder in front on Park Street, provides yet another element in the transformation of downtown San Jose from a small Western town to a successful imitation of Los Angeles in just a few years. For $96m, San Jose got a smallish, clean, spiffy, updated and somewhat soul-less version of the Exploratorium, Frank Oppenheimer’s delightful, hands-on science center for children, a bit to the north of here, built 30 years ago for an amount closer to $96 than $96m. Twenty years in the works `to showcase the gizmos and gadgets that put Silicon Valley at the leading edge of the technological revolution,’ the country’s newest museum features exhibits, electronic games and virtual rides over a 132,000-square foot combination of galleries. Over a half a million visitors are expected annually. A major feature of TheTech is the IMAX Dome Theater, a weirdly claustrophobic, narrow, steeply-raked, 295-seat auditorium with a hemispherical, 82-foot diameter screen literally in your face. Being stacked almost vertically against the screen, and having six-channel, `digital wrap-around sound’ with 13,000 watts of power from 44 speakers coming at you was somewhat at variance with the old-fashioned idea of being entertained and educated — TheTech’s self-proclaimed dual purpose.
Four galleries
The museum is structured in four galleries: Gallery 1/Life Tech (?!), The Human Machine, has a virtual bobsled, ultrasound `X-raying’ the audience, a virtual operating room where visitors can perform eye surgery with argon-based laser (no live frogs around), and watching æanatomically-sliced sections of an actual human body.’ Gallery 2/Innovation, Silicon Valley and Beyond, features a `cleanroom’ (which is vastly different from a clean room) for chip manufacturing, roller-coaster design, `Cyberheads’ to capture a 3-D map of visitors’ head, and an exhibit of computerized design tools at work in developing… bicycles! Gallery 3/Communication, Global Connections, includes cyberchat from one part of the museum to another, a digital studio, and `ground zero of the Information Explosion’ — a circular enclosure with a descending spiral of 20 monitors and five LED panels, `alive with video images… barrage of sounds, images, data, and videos in a dramatic and overwhelming display in which visitors can ponder the deluge of information.’ Thanks, I needed that! Gallery 4/Exploration, New Frontiers, shows an underwater pilot, jet pack simulator, a surprisingly primitive ‘shake table’ for experiencing a virtual earthquake (as if we needed that here!), and bronze molds from the hands of Buzz Aldrin and other astronauts. Visitors can join this hall of fame by placing their hands on a heat-sensitive pad which displays their handprint temporarily. The image then fades. You leave TheTech, and a half an hour later you crave an amusement park or a world’s fair or a good high-school science lab.
