Virtual museum

A virtual museum is a museum that takes advantages of new media digital innovative implementations; to display, preserve, reconstruct, disseminate and store their collections: (paintings, photographs, sculptures, ceramics, antiques, textiles, among others) as digital artifacts and numerical databases which are storage on the virtual museum’s file server.

The digital devices can also be: a production of CD-ROMs and/or web pages showing specific sets of art, a general display of the collection, as well as, learning materials for cultural and educational purposes. Virtual museums enable cultural materials to be reach by new audiences physically far away from their location.

The term can also be used when refer to a museum that exist only on-line. This type of museum portrait new digital art products created by digital technology as an expression technique. Some of these new art forms are: Net art, Virtual Reality and Digital art.

The digitalization of museums is task that has been joining efforts, budgets and research from many museums, cultural associations and governments around the world. For the last few years, there have been projects related to Information Society Technologies dealing with: preservation of cultural heritage, restoration and learning resources. Some examples of contributions in the field of digital and virtual museography: Euromuse.net (EU), DigiCULT (EU), Musings, Digital Museums Projects.

Some studies have reflected that the virtualization of museums can increase the interest for students to learn about their collection: “Virtual visitors to museum websites already out-number physical (on-site) visitors, and many of these are engaged in dedicated learning” [1].

Some of the following museums have been pioneers at developing websites for their collections: The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford (located in one of the earliest purpose-built museum buildings in the world), was also able to initiate a website relatively early because of the advantageous networking facilities and expertise available in their university environment, the Science Museum in London (one of the major science museums in the world), was as well, able to establish an early web presence partly due to the proximity of the Imperial College, but also spurred on by the fact that the Natural History Museum, which is next door, have established the first dedicated museum web server in the United Kingdom just before them. Another early example of an online exhibition with the Library of Congress backing it, was the EXPO Ticket Office with exhibits including a Vatican Exhibit and even a virtual "restaurant" and "post office". This looks very simplistic now, but was novel in 1991. Some others have been produced by enthusiastic individuals such as the Lin Hsin Hsin Art Museum; the UK's 24 Hour Museum and the Virtual Museum of Canada, are professional endeavours.

The technology of virtual museum builds on the concept of interactive environments; it can support interactive exhibitions that display visual representations of the museum by a 3D architectural metaphor providing a sense of place using various spatial references. Usually using 3D modelling, VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) authoring tool for viewing. There have been introduced various kinds of imaging techniques for building virtual museums, such as, infrared reflectography, X-Ray imaging, 3D laser scanning, IBMR (Image Based Rendering and Modelling) techniques. In the case of EU-funded projects, the ViHAP3D, a new virtual reality system, for scanning museum artifacts has been developed by EU researchers.

The genre of the virtual museum continues to develop. It is now recognized in the .museum domain hierarchy; see an online list from MuseDoma.

See also

• Virtual Library museums pages
• Virtual Museum of Canada
• Virtual Museum of Computing
• Virtual Museum of New France