A Configurable Design Approach for Virtual Museums

Abstract

Virtual Museums (VM) are widely used to preserve and to disseminate cultural heritage to the audience, due to the existing evidence that they can enhance the interest on cultural heritage content, while reinforcing motivation for a real museum visit. A variety of technologies are being used including Virtual Reality (VR), to display cultural heritage objects (CHOs) and related information, in order to offer enjoyable and immersive experiences to the visitors. Additionally, educational aspects of VMs are being explored, due to their inheritance from physical museums, which are educational institutions, among their other roles. Innovative approaches such as authoring tools for the creation of VMs have been introduced in order to fulfil the variant needs of field specialist, audience and educators. The diversity of contexts where a VM can be used, require the creation of open access tools to form customizable VMs for every need. This study aims to present a configurable design approach for the creation of VR museums. The goal is to disseminate the virtual artefacts and introduce them in an appealing way to the audience, the field experts and conservators, through VR experiences. The current version of the VM, allows the curators to dynamically insert objects in the virtual space along with their metadata and measurements derived from various scanning processes. The proposed design approach can support the structure of an open access platform for the creation of immersive VM exhibitions.