{"id":7890,"date":"2018-06-07T07:08:01","date_gmt":"2018-06-07T05:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/a-museum-at-your-fingertips-some-thoughts-on-3d-tours-of-museums\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T10:11:59","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T09:11:59","slug":"a-museum-at-your-fingertips-some-thoughts-on-3d-tours-of-museums","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/a-museum-at-your-fingertips-some-thoughts-on-3d-tours-of-museums\/","title":{"rendered":"A museum at your fingertips? Some thoughts on 3D tours of museums"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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More and more cultural institutions create virtual tours that allow visitors to explore the collections at home instead of actually visiting the institutions. In this blog post, I would like to provide some reflections on virtual tours, their usefulness and their limits.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

For decades, the democratisation of culture has been a key issue discussed in cultural policy, not only by policymakers, but also by researchers. In a study on museum visitors published in 1969, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel took a critical stance towards the democratisation and questioned the efficacy of this policy (as implemented at the time). As long as the education at school does not spark an interest in visiting museums, the public visiting them would not change.[1]<\/sup><\/a> More recently, the sociologist Laurent Fleury suggested a nuanced view: the democratisation of education had a much longer history. The fact that the democratisation of culture has not been attained yet is not an argument for its impossibility.[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n

The basic idea of democratisation of culture consists in making (public) cultural institutions more accessible to the public, including previously marginalised social groups. The free entrance to museums figures among the most notable examples of this policy and is implemented in many countries partly (for specific groups such as students or on specific days) or completely (as it is the case in the UK at least for some museums). The digitisation of collections and the possibilities offered by new technologies can provide new ways for democratising cultural institutions. Indeed, in the digital age, culture becomes easier accessible and is potentially only some clicks away \u2013 though the digitised content represents merely a very small fraction of what exists \u2018out there\u2019 in analogue form. At the same time, the digital makes the physicality disappear: the individual does not need to perform a physical act to visit a cultural institution to contemplate historical and cultural objects; nor do the objects themselves need to be moved around or exist in a physical state to be seen, looked at, analysed.<\/p>\n\n

This is true for digital archives, but the same applies to virtual tours, which represent a more sophisticated way of digitising: instead of simply photographing a document or object, a whole environment is scanned and turned into a 3D model. In this context, I would like to share a short personal anecdote: when I was younger and the possibilities of the internet (and of the hardware) were more limited than today, I happened to stumble upon a webpage that promised a virtual tour. Unfortunately, my memory of this experience is too blurry to remember what webpage it was and how old I was. But what I remember was that, in my young naivety, I expected a proper virtual tour in which the user could move around in the virtual world, just like I was used to move my character around in a video game. I was, however, quickly disappointed: the virtual tour consisted of text, pictures and hyperlinks. Since then, the technology has changed and apparently the perception of what a virtual tour is, too. When the National History and Art Museum (Mus\u00e9e national d\u2019histoire et d\u2019art<\/em>, MNHA) and the National Natural History Museum (Mus\u00e9e national d\u2019histoire naturelle<\/em>, MNHN) in Luxembourg-City promoted their new virtual tours a couple of months ago, I was sceptical.[3]<\/sup><\/a> I have never really followed the developments in the creation of virtual or 3D tours. Though I knew that virtual reconstructions are possible, I have never really thought about cultural institutions offering a virtual model of their own buildings. Still shaped by my experience as an early teenager boy I was, even as someone in his late twenties, uncertain whether these virtual tours would keep their promise.<\/p>\n\n

This time, however, it was different. These are \u2018proper\u2019 virtual tours with a virtual reality option (which I have not tried out). At first, I was positively surprised. The museums\u2019 virtual tours reminded me of Google Street View, only within a building. Images were taken with a special camera in regular intervals at specific scan points and the user navigates by moving (or rather jumping) from one point to the next. The California-based company Matterport developed the technology used by the two national museums. Though primarily developed for the real estate sector, the service provided by Matterport has been used by cultural (heritage) institutions, too. The gallery on the company\u2019s webpage<\/a> lists the places that were digitized and turned into 3D tours. The list can be explored by choosing a specific category, such as \u201carts and culture\u201d, \u201cevents spaces\u201d or \u201creal estate\u201d. Under the first mentioned category, the user discovers virtual tours of institutions around the world, such as the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery<\/a> in London. Matterport is not the only company creating virtual tours. Google\u2019s Arts & Culture page<\/a> offers such tours of institutions, too. The basic principles are the same. However, in the case of the Van Gogh Museum<\/a> in Amsterdam, for instance, the visitor can explore the gallery of the museum\u2019s collection and access additional metadata, mostly basic information on the artworks. Such galleries are not included in Matterport\u2019s virtual tours, at least not to my knowledge. The creation of virtual tours can also be done from a preservation perspective, to capture what will disappear or has already disappeared. Such has been the case of the closed BBC Television Centre in London, integrated into Google Streetview, accessible on Google Maps or under this link<\/a>.[4]<\/sup><\/a> In these cases, the digital becomes an extension of the analogue. It provides an afterlife to objects and buildings that do or will not exist anymore. Another well-known example in this context is the project #NEWPALMYRA, a virtual reconstruction of the UNESCO heritage site Palmyra, considerably destroyed by the war in Syria.<\/p>\n\n\n

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