Virtual Volleyball : Technology: Athletes try simulation of the game without the beach, sand or even a ball. It’s part of a new Museum of Science and Industry exhibit.

There were no slams into the net or head-first dives into the sand when two beach volleyball stars squared off against each other in the most unusual game ever played in Los Angeles.

That’s because there was no net and no sand as top-ranked players Kent Steffes and Kevin Waterbury competed near Downtown. No ball, either.

The pair were playing “virtual reality” volleyball. Instead of a 60-foot rectangle traced on a sunny Malibu beach, their court was created by a computerized camera and a wall-size screen in a darkened corner of the California Museum of Science and Industry.

Steffes and Waterbury were smack in the middle of the biggest arcade game ever.

But this was no primitive Pong match where players have to poke buttons to send an electronic blip across a tiny video display. The computer was creating full-size images of the athletes hitting a simulated ball over a simulated net.

The high-tech volleyball is part of a $2 1/2-million display of lasers, holograms and computer imagery that opens a three-month exhibition today at the museum in Exposition Park.

The “Liquid Vision” exhibit manipulates light and sound to do things such as make a banana split sundae disappear and turn the most tone-deaf visitor into a rock ‘n’ roll star.

There is a laser shooting gallery where bull’s-eyes are rewarded with spectacular electronic fireworks displays. One demonstration turns onlookers into a green-eyed wolf through a digital “morphing” technique. Another uses helmet-mounted video screens and motion-sensing handsets to create a three-dimensional illusion of flying through the air.

The volleyball game is the most spectacular illusion, however. Even the professionals there for a preview were impressed.

“There’s absolutely no ball here. But there’s a ball on the screen, and it knows where your hands are,” said Steffes, 25, a Pacific Palisades resident who earned $410,000 playing volleyball professionally in 1993.

Waterbury, 22, of Santa Monica, said: “In a few years virtual reality will probably have sand and sun, too. Then we can just practice at home without even going to the beach.”

The exhibit is being loaned to Los Angeles by Ohio’s Center of Science and Industry. It will travel to museums around the country for three years.

Local officials acknowledged that computer-savvy children will probably take to “Liquid Vision” faster than parents. But grown-ups will easily relate to a neighboring exhibition--the one across the aisle from the lasers and digital equipment.

It’s the earthquake exhibit. And a seismograph there is instantaneously displaying squiggles from the continuing aftershocks from the Jan. 17 temblor.

That’s the kind of virtual reality everybody understands.