As an 18 year old high school student, I was able to snag a free seat on a field trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, just a little trip to Boston from my hometown of Claremont, NH. In 1998, my high school had just lost its accreditation, I had just flunked pre-calculus for the second year in a row, and I had absolutely no direction in my life. Three months later I would be kicked out of college for a 0.6 first-semester GPA, to begin the very long, awkward journey of finding myself. This takes many more years before the first success.
But that trip to this museum, one included on this website as a virtual tour, planted a seed, deep down in my mind that would take years to spout. The museum is a Venetian palace, and at the center, draped by shadows that lurch outwards from receding hallways, lies a majestic courtyard, adorned with crenulation and dentils that mesmerize and steal the time from day. A trashy townie punk stood there aghast that beauty could render so closely, and knew there for maybe the first time that a world beyond home awaited.
I never got a chance to thank the man that let me sneak aboard that bus, but many times already I have felt the spirit of sharing to an outsider that access, and evermore will I continue for it is only during these moments that we can so easily take stock of what we've been.
"Walking tour new York city"
"Walking tour paris"
"Walking tour ..."
Pick the longer videos on YouTube or filter for them. I throw one on mute and just leave it on while I'm on my couch working. Nice to see people up and about while you're alone.
Also, you notice people coughing/sneezing way more now even if the video is years old.
Is it strange that I would enjoy these far more if they were embedded in a walkable version of the museum running in a game engine? Like "virtually visit a museum" is a lot more appealing than "look at pictures of things that are in museums".
No, I feel the same way. I went to the page for SFMOMA, and honestly I feel like the architecture of the building and the arrangement of the pieces in the space totally gives it the "museum feel". The pictures of the art struck me as if they could have come out of a textbook.
But exhibitions change all the time; it would be hard to keep a virtual walkable museum up-to-date with the real-world one. Plus it'd require more headcount, and more powerful gpus on the viewer side, and more edge cases wrt operating systems and browser combos to test.
I saw videos of a penguin walking around an aquarium in Chicago going around, and I found that gave me more of the feeling I was looking for.
That would be fantastic on a 4K monitor, with the capability of zooming into the paintings and the original audioguide sound. And the soundscape please. And the ability to customize the sound of my own footsteps. I would absolutely enjoy that.
Some museums have amazing architecture and feel (The Foundation of Joan Miro in Barcelona is a great example) and having that feel represented by a proper walkable 3D environment would greatly enhance the experience.
I'm a bit concerned though that simulated museum visitors may break the immersion -- we haven't crossed the Uncanny Valley yet.
There are a lot of 360 style virtual reality museums and famous travel destinations that I enjoy in my Oculus Quest. I am going to send the linked URI to friends without VR gear, it is very good stuff.
FWIW, I created a tool that automagically walks through a Google street view (originally done for road trips through cities). I've now added some of those museums. I leave it running and occasionally look where it has led me to --> https://roadtraveller.herokuapp.com/
Since last Friday I've been making my Zoom virtual background a daily rotation of artwork. It's been a fun and educational experience for me (I'm no art expert, just a casual fan of museums) and I think my friends and co-workers have enjoyed it. When you're mostly stuck at home all day it's nice to have a daily "new" to look forward to.
I've been recording my choices and when this is over I'll have a little "Zoom Museum" as a kind of artistic memorial of the pandemic.
This link is a great source for new art, so thank you OP!
Virtual tour? Since when is a virtual tour a collection of pictures in a random order? Walking in a museum is also about the sense of space and how everything is organized. Such abuse of words.
Perhaps it doesn't work for every museum, but for the one I tried (Van Gogh Museum) you can get a Street View-like view where you can actually move around the museum and look around, by clicking the yellow human street view icon.
I just walked through Rijksmuseum using street view and checked out Louis XIV chamber from Versailles on 3D. Not to mention a couple of very detailed interactive analyses of some paintings telling their story and highlighting details I would normally completely miss. I think this is awesome and impressive on how much content there is.
Maybe someday we'll have a full 3D VR tour, but there's a lot of great stuff there already.
I have sent a suggestion to Google to combine this with Google Hangout Meet, so quarantined friends can see and talk to each other while watching the images. I also suggested to split virtual visitors into random tourist groups, so if you visit the virtual museum alone you can be joined by others if you want to... and they should add virtual tours if they don't have them yet, where a real museum guide joins the group and gives a tour.
I hope they read my suggestion and can implement these features.
Google Meet seems to be the only one currently not cracking under the increased load, while Zoom, Webex, and others are starting to fail. I guess there's little room to add features right now...
Google puts the museum hours at the bottom of the museum landing pages. These hours are unlikely to be valid for the time being, with so many museums being closed. How often are the hours scraped and reposted? Or were these entered manually? It’s a nitpick, of course, but much of good design is attention to details like this. I would have left this section out; it’s unlikely this info would ever be maintained correctly.
We're working on virtual tours of the natural world at Trek View (https://www.trekview.org) to promote environmental education and conservation.
Right now we're currently rushing to build free, open lesson plans for teachers running classes remotely around our imagery. If anyone would like to help out, no tech skills required, please PM me.
There is a Google Arts and Culture VR app available. It's nice because it also has commentaries on some of the pieces of artwork so it's almost like going on a real tour in a gallery.
I tried some of them. All of them have a horribly low UX and UI. That means they are 100% unusable. Please hire some Silicon Valley engineers and make SPEED a feature. As it's now', it is pretty much totally worthless. I'm sorry to say so. Take it as real feedback. I tried it once, horribly slow, I'll never go back.
This is a good way to "burn through" a huge audience, which will remember you as a "slow, hard, and unusable service", and never come back. It won't matter then how hard you try to push or market.
I'm a bit confused: the featured link here seems to be made by Google, and seems pretty performant in Firefox on a 6-year-old Macbook (albeit with a good Internet connection). Were you thinking of other links that had been shared before?
But that trip to this museum, one included on this website as a virtual tour, planted a seed, deep down in my mind that would take years to spout. The museum is a Venetian palace, and at the center, draped by shadows that lurch outwards from receding hallways, lies a majestic courtyard, adorned with crenulation and dentils that mesmerize and steal the time from day. A trashy townie punk stood there aghast that beauty could render so closely, and knew there for maybe the first time that a world beyond home awaited.
I never got a chance to thank the man that let me sneak aboard that bus, but many times already I have felt the spirit of sharing to an outsider that access, and evermore will I continue for it is only during these moments that we can so easily take stock of what we've been.
Support the arts.