"Six potential investors wrote to say that they'd like to help, and I consulted with my existing team developing the game system. After we demanded that they sign a confidentiality agreement to protect our intellectual property, the interest petered out."

Hayut-Man heads the self-styled Academy of Jerusalem, a think-tank association of 20 "multidisciplinary visionaries. My main mission is to design the games, to show a truth about Jerusalem that nobody seems to notice: The [Third] Temple already exists. It's straight in front of our eyes, in the most conspicuous place. Depicted as a temple of wisdom and womb for the three religions, it can breed interfaith understanding."

He envisages a hovering holographic temple, projected by an array of high-powered, water-cooled lasers fired into a smoke-filled transparent polyurethane cube with a lightweight metal frame suspended beneath a blimp. The ephemeral, flickering image in the three-dimensional projection screen will fulfill an ancient Jewish prophecy that the Temple will descend from the heavens as a manifestation of light, he explains.

"Rashi [the biblical commentator] envisioned the Temple as a structure of light in the sky. Technology has given us the tools to realize this prophecy."

Hayut-Man bases his ideas on the thesis of the 19th-century Jewish Hungarian orientalist Ignaz Goldziher - one of the first non-Muslim researchers of Islam - that the Temple Mount was a substitute for the Ka'ba in Mecca.

"Goldziher's ideas never became widely accepted, but [Hebrew University] Prof. Amikam Elad's recent research into medieval Jerusalem and Islamic worship proves that this was their intention," he says. "This may seem inconceivable to today's Muslims, but Islamic historians have found more supporting material."

Hayut-Man has further corroboration from Kabbala researchers who have explored the Dome's meaning in terms of the neo-pythagorian esoteric science of that time.

"This was not the zealous Islam that we know nowadays. The Dome of the Rock was not intended as a mosque. It has no religious use, but rather symbolic value. Muslims turn their butts to it when they pray on the Temple Mount. Conceptually, not only Muslims turn away from it - Jews and Christians also do."

Hayut-Man says that his research complements these findings by speculating about the craftsmen. He describes the structure as a precise hyper-dimensional portal.

"Halif Abd El-Malik, who built the Dome in 692, gathered the greatest artisans from Morocco to India to rebuild Solomon's Temple. The secrets of this geometric architectural language were kept within the masons' guilds. Most people intuitively appreciate the building's proportions without understanding its exquisite geometric patterns."

The Dome of the Rock, he explains, was conceptualized as an observatory into the fifth dimension. It was built as a 3-D model of a 4-D cube.

"The rock is surrounded by seven concentric rings of portals - 24 gates, then 16 gates, then 16 windows, roof patterns subdivided into 32 figures, etc. All these numbers are typical of 4-D and 5-D cubes. It completed a sacred design of the Heavenly Jerusalem, as described in the Zohar."

The Hayut-Man family has lived in the Katamon neighborhood for 15 years. They have two children, aged 21 and 15.

He can no longer afford his former arched-ceiling office in the Jewish Quarter, where the golden reflection of the Omar Mosque, barely 150 meters away, would envelope his study with a shimmering yellow sheen on sunny afternoons.

Hayut-Man is involved in an ongoing $20 million patent-infringement suit against the Palm Corporation. Together with two other Israeli inventors, he claims that in 1995 he filed a design for cheap, wireless game consoles with the US Patent and Trademark Office, and should therefore receive royalties on what has since become a commonplace device.

The project includes a laser-projected temple. The goal: to summon the Messiah.

He was born into a wealthy Haifa family. A free spirit, he spent periods as a dropout on the West Coast and traveled through the jungles of Brazil after his military service.

During the Sixties, he studied architecture at UC Berkeley and cybernetics in London, where his interest in Sacred Geometry began. In 1965, he first met his spiritual mentor, the late cyberguru Buckminster Fuller.

He earned a masters degree in urban planning at the Haifa Technion and in 1981 completed his PhD in cybernetics at London's Brunel University, where his dissertation described a virtual Temple Mount where Jews and Arabs could interact.

With his bushy white beard and flowery use of both Hebrew and English, Hayut-Man is an impressive man. He rises early to swim or play basketball before sitting down in his single-room Rehavia office at 8:30 a.m., often working into the evening.

"I write proposals. Right now, I'm finishing an interpretation of the Book of Genesis, written in future tense. Genesis should be read as a prophecy written 3,000 years ago, a blueprint for constructing Israel as a multi-tribal national entity. Genesis is about the God of Israel, not the God of the Jews."

Samples of some of his voluminous papers can be seen at his Web site, www.thehope.org.

"I'm concerned with existential problems. I was in the Old City for 13 years. I would walk through every neighborhood and I never felt I was in any danger."

Within a week of moving to Rehavia, a caf was blown up less than 100 meters away from Hayut-Man on Derech Aza.

"It's too late for a two-state solution - that option was never viable. One state can fulfill the biblical ideal. It's not a matter of us against them, rather tribes with different views and beliefs."

He derives hope from the separation fence that is cutting the city in two.

"I have found to my great surprise that this beastly wall will complement the holy structure of the city. A new wall around Jerusalem, with a new set of gates - that should be controlled by soldiers alongside residents who know their neighbors on the other side - will become the first of seven stages of defining people's intentions. The first criterion for entering the city should be no weapons. There will be finer spiritual criteria for approaching the holy [Temple] Mount, the Dome of the Rock, and the rock itself."

Hayut-Man doesn't think the religious will build the Third Temple - the secular will.

"We can spontaneously build a temple of peace. Twelve tribes can balance each other and create a stable solution for our grandchildren. It can be done right now, if people are ready to drop their preconceptions." But is the Middle East ready for Dr. Hayut-Man?