An approach to designing and implementing virtual museums

The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum

Lately, Virtual Reality has offered new presentation methods for exhibitions in museums and galleries. Although the school use of virtual museums can offer a lot to Art educators, the inadmissible cost for creating such an application and the time consuming management of the content, prevent this technology from everyday school life. Our approach aims to offer to Art educators of Primary and Middle school a software platform to create and publish their own virtual museums on the Internet. Before presenting our approach, a review of the international presence of sample of virtual museums in the Internet is considered necessary. Also an attempt to categorize them according to their potential, structure, and contents has to be made. The architectural design, collections creation and content management of our Virtual Reality Learning Environments (VRLE) prototype will be briefly presented.

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.

For several years now the concept of virtual museum has had an important role among the means being used for the diffusion of cultural information, as it offers an important extension to the traditional museum. In this paper we briefly discuss the concepts of the applications of virtual museums, by studying the transformation of a real museum into a virtual museum. We also introduce the two new concepts of “the museum of museums” and that of “the imaginary museum”. We define the portal functions and the virtual functions of a real museum, and then the functions of the “museum of museums” and of the “imaginary museum”. We also breafly summarize the technical Internet context implied in the realization of a virtual museum and its main operating principles.

JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2021

This paper presents a survey of innovative concepts and technologies involved in virtual museums (ViM) that shows their advantages and disadvantages in comparison with physical museums. We describe important lessons learned during the creation of three major virtual museums between 2010 and 2020 with partners at universities from Armenia, Germany, and Chile. Based on their categories and features, we distinguish between content-, communication- and collaboration-centric museums with a special focus on learning and co-curation. We give an overview of a generative approach to ViMs using the ViMCOX metadata format, the curator software suite ViMEDEAS, and a comprehensive validation and verification management. Theoretical considerations include exhibition design and new room concepts, positioning objects in their context, artwork authenticity, digital instances and rights management, distributed items, private museum and universal access, immersion, and tour and interaction design for ...

2011

Virtual cultural heritage research in Bosnia and Herzegovina results with a number of virtual reconstructions and virtual museums (VM). Virtual Museums are online multimedia applications using various digital content and implementation technologies. This paper presents an overview of these technologies used in our projects and their efficiency from the user's point of view.

2004

Abstract A system that allows museums to build and manage Virtual and Augmented Reality exhibitions based on 3D models of artifacts is presented. Dynamic content creation based on pre-designed visualization templates allows content designers to create virtual exhibitions very efficiently. Virtual Reality exhibitions can be presented both inside museums, eg on touch-screen displays installed inside galleries and, at the same time, on the Internet.