Virtual museum

A virtual museum is a museum that exists only on-line, including, but not limited, to museums that hold object originally created digitally, such as Net art, Virtual Reality and Digital art. It is often used to refer to a museum that takes advantages of the Internet to display digital representations, of its collections.

Different projects

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.

Increased interests

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].

Pioneers

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.

Museum of computer art

One of the most successful and comprehensive of the virtual museums is the Museum of Computer Art, often identified by its acronym MOCA. It was founded in 1993 and is directed by Don Archer. It operates as a non-profit corporation under charter from the Department of Education of New York State (US). It was awarded .museum top-level domain (TLD) status by the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) in 2002 and is hosted on the Web as http://moca.virtual.museum.

External links

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