The time machine drops you onto the dusty streets of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. The year is 1211.
A few hundred yards ahead is a Romanesque cathedral, nearly complete after 100 years of construction. It seems to soar toward the heavens. The cathedral's grandeur befits one of Christianity's holiest sites, reportedly containing the remains of the apostle James the Great.
Entering the side door of the cathedral used by most pilgrims, you hear shoes clicking on the stone floor, muffled voices, and Latin chants from the St. James liturgy and music from medieval flutes, drums and bagpipes.
You walk behind the altar and go down five steps of a narrow passageway to the tomb of St. James, brother of John the Evangelist and a member of Jesus' inner circle. James was a fisherman called by Jesus and thought to have evangelized in Spain. He was beheaded in Jerusalem in AD 44 and believed to be the first of the apostles to suffer a martyr's death.
It occurs to you that millions of people have traveled this same path -- to this very spot -- over the last thousand years, making it one of Christendom's most popular pilgrimages.
Goosebumps rise on your arm -- and you haven't even left Los Angeles.
Which is the idea behind UCLA's Visualization Portal, a virtual reality theater that re-creates ancient worlds, natural phenomena such as tornados, and the inner workings of the human body -- showing, for instance, a fibrillating heart and how experimental drugs might return its beat to normal.
The 3D re-creations are used for research, teaching, attracting grants and outreach to the public. Professors -- with disciplines including architecture, chemistry, literature, atmospheric sciences, performing arts and astronomy -- and technology experts have worked together to create various virtual realties.
More than 40 architectural computer models have been developed, many of them depicting ancient buildings and towns that allow viewers to virtually stroll down the streets, step inside a home or even fly over the walled cities.
Seated in a comfortable theater that holds about 40 people, you can peek into the 26 buildings and monuments of the Roman Forum in AD 400; study frescoes painted on a bedroom wall in a Pompeii villa in AD 79; and enter the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in AD 70, just before its destruction by Roman troops.
