Museums and the Web

"In the brief years since the appearance of the first museum Web sites, most museums have established some presence on the World Wide Web. Museums have much to learn from each other, and from developers using the Web for other applications. To facilitate this exchange of information, Archives & Museum Informatics organises an annual international conference devoted exclusively to Museums and the Web."

Read what Glenda Sims had to say about this year's conference in her original Oz blog! Check out all the new features being explored by museums such as blogs...(yes, bloggin!), social tagging and more.


Also, check out the features that the Los Angeles Getty Museum was able to showcase in one of their online exhibits (follow the link below). While navigating through the works of sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon you can not only zoom in and out to get incredibly close views of the marble, but you can also spin the sculpture around and see it from all sides! All it takes is a couple quick clicks of the mouse!

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/houdon/

Your Second Life is ready!

Explore Second Life, "a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 1,221,392 people from around the globe." Read the Popular Science article on this amazing virtual world.

UNCG Develops Ground-Breaking Video Game for College Credit

Video games for college credit?! Believe it! This alien could be your econ prof...

Another LVM feature

You can explore this feature "Create your own gallery" at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. This feature allows you to fully explore the archives and then gives you full curatorial control on how you organize your gallery!

The beginnings of the Pygoya Museum

Pygoya WebMuseum: "WHAT 'PYGOYA MUSEUM' MEANS

miss Binita Shome, museum homepage designer, wrote:
> I need to know how u've conceptualized the site'pygoya museum'...write to me in details...that'll help me in creating the designs as per ur imagination; want my designs to match with ur thinking...

OK, think about this when you design the creation-
I'm am this art student in this dream one night, attending virtually an
opening exhibition of this artist called Pygoya. I awoke and remembered
and liked that fictitious fantasy figure from the surrealism of the
dream state. I like his Asian Abstract murals and also adopted to my
style. This style I have done since 1985 after shifting from bronze
metalwork to digital mouse. Now there are thousands of originals
executed on computers since 1985. The aggregate growing collection is
given a central site to view them, with background history, just like a
visit to the local art museum. So online, we have Pygoya Webmusem
before but now Binita I want you to call it Pygoya Museum. Hey, a
museum is a museum., online or off-line. See and enjoy many pictures.
Now I like to act upon the belief that my works displayed on the
Internet become indigenous cyberculture as well as original art endemic
to the Web. So the life collection of Pygoyan images launched very
periodic shifting moment keeps advancing with the future. The myriad of
parading images show metamorphosing into new graphic veils with the
changing commerical preferences for generic grapic programming. But all maintain
the same kernel of the artist's spirit that continues to evolve along with
the technology, as well as contribute to global world art culture and experience.
-Pygoya 3/7/2003"

Features for LVM

Also in the Smithsonian Virtual Museum, you can see VRML models for some objects. This means that you come in contact with a virtual model of one of the planes designed by the Wright Brothers. You can't walk/touch/fly on the actual model in the National Air and Space Museum, but you can definitely do that here!

This is another feature found within the Smithsonian Virtual Museum. It is called the morph feature, which consists of transforming an object into another image. In this case a painting (slide 1 upper left)is morphed into the actual photograph of the place depicted. (slide 4 lower right)


This is the first slide of a presentation on the most recurrent features in highly publicized virtual exhibtions/tours.
Visit the site!

Capturing Content for Virtual Museums:

from Pieces to Exhibits

Bradley Hemminger, Gerald Bolas1, Doug Schiff2

School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina

Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360

1Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina

Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3400

23rdTech 119 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC 27514

Email: bmh@ils.unc.edu

ABSTRACT

Virtual museums provide ways to capture the

content of a real museum in a digital (electronic)

form and make this digital form more universally

available. This paper describes a novel method for

digitally recording not only individual museum

pieces, but entire museum exhibits (consisting of one

or more rooms or spaces). The methodology allows

anyone with access to the Internet or a PC to

experience anywhere, anytime, any part of the

museum’s collection or exhibits (past, present and

future). Users can explore the museum exhibits in a

virtual reality that is both spatially accurate and

visually compelling. All objects and 3D scenes are

seen in precise full color photographic quality detail.

The scene and objects are polygonal meshes

representing the surfaces of objects. This permits

making measurements directly on the scene with

millimeter precision. The methodology, its

application to capturing museum exhibits, and

examples of exhibits recorded using this technique

are described. This work is part of the Virseum

project (http://ils.unc.edu/bmh/virseum) at the

School of Information and Library Science at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

In addition to the capture of items and exhibits for

virtual access, this methodology opens the door for

many other applications, including capturing a

record of an exhibit for archival purposes and for

communication between curators, and for the design

of virtual (never physically implemented) exhibits

and pieces based on actual pieces and settings.

Categories and Subject Descriptors (ACM)

• H.3.7 Digital Libraries • I.4.1 Digitization and

Image Capture • H.5 INFORMATION

INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (e.g., HCI)

• J.5 ARTS AND HUMANITIES

Keywords

Digital library, virtual museums, virtual exhibits, 3D

digitization, 3D object scanning, 3D visualization.

VIRTUAL MUSEUMS: FIRST RESULTS OF A SURVEY ON METHODS AND TOOLS

Sylaiou S.¹, Liarokapis F.², Sechidis L.¹, Patias P.¹, Georgoula O.¹

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece¹

sylaiou@photo.topo.auth.gr, lazikas@photo.topo.auth.gr, patias@topo.auth.gr. olge@topo.auth.gr

City University, London, U.K.²

fotisl@soi.city.ac.uk

Keywords: Cultural Heritage, Virtual Museum, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Web3D

Abstract

Museums are interested in digitizing their collections in order not only to preserve the cultural information, but also to make it available to the wide public in an attractive manner. Emerging technologies, such as VR, AR and Web3D are widely used for creating virtual museum exhibitions in a museum environment through informative kiosks and on the World Wide Web. This paper makes a survey in the field and explores the various kinds of virtual museums, their advantages and limitations by presenting old and new methods and tools used for their creation.

Virtual museums can respond in various ways to visitors’ needs. With the use of VR, AR and Internet technologies, they can provide an entertaining and educational experience. Additionally, they enrich the museum experience by enabling an intuitive interaction with the virtual museum artifacts. The benefits of virtual museums are noteworthy for museum curators and various groups of end-users, like students, specialists and tourists.

Virtual museums have the potential to preserve and disseminate the cultural information in an effective and low-cost way through innovative methods and tools. They do not aim at replacing the physical museums, but they act complementary. Virtual museums that are an engaging medium with great appeal to various visitors’ groups can promote the ‘real sites’ by providing information about museum exhibitions and offer an enhanced display of museums’ artefacts through emerging technologies.

Creating Virtual Museum For The Historical Malacca’s Glittering Emergence In The Cyber World

CONCEPT REVIEW

1. Create an efficient and competitive virtual environment to promote Melaka’s success in the fields of history, culture, and tourism at home and abroad by removing obstacles to growth of knowledge capital.

2. Establish a safe heaven for incubation of intellectual property by obtaining the exclusive right to build and digitize the contents related to history in Malaysia.

3. Broaden access and shorten the geographical distance for current and future generations to expose to rich and varied cultural and traditional values by streaming the digitzed contents through Internet.

4. Develop the educational potential and raise standards of cultural education and training.

5. Ensure all citizens have the equal opportunity to achieve excellence in conservation of history and applications of IT by developing talent as well as cultivating innovation.

6. Setup the new international standard to certify the methodology and technology in preservation of the integrity of the historical records.

7. Promote the role of the governments in urban and rural regeneration in pursuing social harmony by understanding the lessons learned in history.

8. Develop various coherent and consistent events, gallery drama, guided tours, exhibitions, and scientific expeditions to generate and sustain public interest in learning history and IT.

benefits of the state department

1. Promote and complement domestic tourism industry by introducing Melaka as the history and knowledge hub to other states and the rest of the world.

2. Create more employment opportunity, especially service and knowledge based industries.

3. Cultivate, generate, and preserve the intellectual property right by the local people.

4. Promote and educate public regarding the unique history heritage and culture of Melaka state.

5. Provide a platform for exchange knowledge, conversation of history, culture and traditional value.

6. Improve trade and communications between the Melaka and other states and countries.

The beginnings...

How do you define a virtual museum?

• (2006) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"A virtual museum (sometimes web museum) is an online website with a collection of objects (real or virtual) or exhibitions. They include contemporary, historical and sometimes artistic content. Examples include the Virtual Museum of Computing. Some are produced by enthusiastic individuals such as the Lin Hsin Hsin Art Museum; others, like the UK's 24 Hour Museum and the Virtual Museum of Canada, are professional endeavours."

• (1995) From Building Virtual Museums

"A virtual museum is a collection of electronic artifacts and information resources - virtually anything which can be digitized. The collection may include paintings, drawings, photographs, diagrams, graphs, recordings, video segments, newspaper articles, transcripts of interviews, numerical databases and a host of other items which may be saved on the virtual museum's file server. It may also offer pointers to great resources around the world relevant to the museum's main focus."