About

Virtual museums provide ways to capture the content of a real museum in a digitial (electronic) form and make this digital form more universally available. Virseum is a novel method involving digitally recording not only individual museum pieces, but entire museum exhibits (consisting of one or more rooms or spaces). The technique digitizes the entire contents of the rooms in an exhibit. 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. Figures 1 and 2 show combinations of the virtual reality views seen by the user with the wireframe representations of the underlying model (as captured by the digitizer). Paper

The best way to appreciate a Virseum is to experience it. We have made available the first museum exhibit ever complete digitally captured, the Ackland Art Museum "Plum, Pine and Bamboo: Seasonal and Spirtual Paths in Japanese Art (1994)". To experience it download the Exhibit and Viewer. For you to experience the virtual reality properly, we recommend at least a 2Ghz CPU with 1Gbyte or more memory, and 128 Mbytes or more of texture memory on the graphics card.