A coworker of mine just came back from JPL after participating in the MER-A landing. He told us that there is a room at JPL where the surrounding walls are stereo-image video projections. A person goes into this room wearing special polaroid glasses that enable viewing the walls as three dimensional images. The images shown were those recently downloaded from MER-A. My coworker said the illusion was almost complete that he was standing on the surface of Mars. I asked him what it felt like. He said that he was really struck by the total lack of vegetation. I've been to places where there is no vegetation, e.g. deserts in Namibia. It is weird being in a place where there are no plants.

Gary