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The virtual tour of the White City fairgrounds is part of a 11/2-hour presentation titled "Blueprints to Our Past" that also includes an hourlong guided tour through the museum building, the only surviving pavilion from the fair. The price is a whopping $40 per person, which includes general admission. Because "Blueprints" is designed as a small-group tour limited to 20 visitors, tickets must be bought in advance.

To create the World's Fair tour, old maps, blueprints and photographs of the exposition were used to build a digital re-creation of its stupendous Beaux Arts exhibit halls and canals, reproducing them in remarkable detail. Digital images of the fair's pavilions are projected in color on a big screen, giving viewers the sensation they are walking on the fair's promenades or riding in an electric canal boat as they move among the buildings.

Still a work in progress, the virtual tour is the creation of architectural historian Lisa Snyder and her urban simulation team at the UCLA School of Architecture. Museum officials said they put the tour together because of burgeoning public fascination with the 1893 exposition, particularly since publication of the best-selling 2003 novel "The Devil in the White City."

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