Abstract
With the ever-advancing availability of digitized museum artifacts, the question of how to make the vast collection of exhibits accessible and explorable beyond what museums traditionally offer via their websites and exposed databases has recently gained increased attention. This research work introduces the Invisible Museum: a user-centric platform that allows users to create interactive and immersive virtual 3D/VR exhibitions using a unified collaborative authoring environment. The platform itself was designed following a Human-Centered Design approach, with the active participation of museum curators and end-users. Content representation adheres to domain standards such as International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (CIDOC-CRM) and the Europeana Data Model and exploits state-of-the-art deep learning technologies to assist the curators by generating ontology bindings for textual data. The platform enables the formulation and semantic representation of narratives that guide storytelling experiences and bind the presented artifacts with their socio-historic context. Main contributions are pertinent to the fields of (a) user-designed dynamic virtual exhibitions, (b) personalized suggestions and exhibition tours, (c) visualization in web-based 3D/VR technologies, and (d) immersive navigation and interaction. The Invisible Museum has been evaluated using a combination of different methodologies, ensuring the delivery of a high-quality user experience, leading to valuable lessons learned, which are discussed in the article.
Highlights
Virtual Museums (VMs) aim to provide the means to establish access, context, and outreach by using information technology [1]
This section discusses the outcomes of this work and attempts to provide reusable knowledge regarding three directions (a) potential guidelines that come out of the lessons learned and are generalizable for the domain, (b) limitations that should be noted for driving further research endeavors, and (c) technical limitations and the need for new technologies to fully implement the vision of this research work
The platform differentiates from all previous similar works in the sense that it is a generic technological framework not paired to a specific real-world museum
Summary
Virtual Museums (VMs) aim to provide the means to establish access, context, and outreach by using information technology [1]. VMs have evolved from digital duplicates of “real” museums or online museums into complex communication systems, which are strongly connected with narratives in 3D reconstructed scenarios [2] This evolution has provided a wide variety of VMs instantiations delivered through multiple platforms and technologies, aiming to visually explain history, architecture, and or artworks (indoor virtual archaeology, embedded virtual reconstructions, etc.). VMs have been envisioned as virtual places that provide access to structured museum narratives and immersive experiences [2] This evolution has provided a wide variety of VM instantiations delivered through multiple platforms and technologies. Examples include Google Arts and Culture [5], Inventing
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