Today, there are many digital archives, libraries and museums with rich digital collections representing cultural and historical heritage.
The new challenge shifts from accessing resources to effectively using them and avoiding information overload. The possibility of a virtual tour of these facilities allows users to explore places of cultural interest as mentioned earlier. This makes exhibits available to a broader audience that might not be able to travel physically or serves as an incentive to visit the real place. There are already websites offering increasingly sophisticated visualizations.
The increasing development of interactive techniques and new information technologies software and hardware and the decreasing of their costs have facilitated their use by a wide range of cultural institutions such as Museums.
These new technologies also provided solutions for the lack of exhibition space considerable exhibition costs and the fragility of some artifacts whose possible damage museum curators want to prevent. The value of these new tools and formats has been recognized and fruitfully exploited by curators for visualizing the cultural context of museum exhibitions.
In addition, museums changed their way of conveying information about their products or artifacts to the wider public through new communication methods, like visual museums which have made the content and context of the museum collections more reachable or accessible and attractive to a wider public. During the last decade, various kinds of “Virtual Museum” have been developed either in the museum environment or over the world wide web. A virtual museum can be a digital collection that is presented either over the WWW, on the internet, or even on a CD-ROM and it can be an extension of a physical museum or it can exist only in a digital form. Furthermore, the virtual museum can have various forms. It can be a 3D reconstruction of the physical museum, where the virtual rooms of the museum exhibition, the visitors can navigate and explore its collections. Alternatively, it can be a completely imaginary environment in the form of various rooms where the cultural artifacts are placed.
In this presentation or study, the actual example of an e-museum is the actual case of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Arts in Thessaloniki Greece. This particular museum since 2005 has shifted from the analogue manner of presenting its objects to the public. Although there are no official figures yet for the number of virtual museums presently existing worldwide, although we know there are thousands of them and that their number is rapidly on the increase, this is a leading museum that has been properly documented in this regard. It is an electronic or e-museum and can also be referred to as a “Virtual Museum” or “Digital Museum” or “Cybermuseum” or still “Online museum” and web museum with no standard definition or prevailing terms. This museum adopted a logically related collection of digital objects composed in a variety of media and because of its capacity to provide connectedness and various points of access, it lends itself to transcending traditional methods of communicating and interacting with the visitors being flexible toward their needs and interest; it has no real place or space. Its objects and related information can be disseminated all over the world.
According to (ICOM 2004) International Council of Museums. Three categories of virtual museums on the internet are developed as extensions of physical museums.
i. The Brochure Museum
ii. The Content Museum
iii. The Learning Museum
The brochure museum is a website that aims to inform further visitors about the museum. It usually contains administrative information about the museum such as opening hours, services, types of collections, floor plan of the museum, map of the area where it is situated, contact details, and so on.
The content museum is a website created to make information about the museum collections available. It can be identified as a database containing detailed information about the museum collections, with the content presented in an object-oriented or object-centered way.
The learning museum is a website that offers different points of access to its virtual visitors depending on their age, background, and knowledge. The information is presented in a context-oriented, rather than object-oriented way. Moreover, the site is educationally enhanced and linked to additional information intended to motivate the virtual visitor to learn more about a subject of particular interest to them and to visit the site again. The goal of the learning museum is to make virtual visitors come back and to make him or her establish a personal relationship with the online collections.
In the case of the virtual Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the last category of learning museum is what it represents with the aid of emerging technologies such as Web3D and innovative approaches, like educational games, a virtual environment that contains extensive information about the exhibits and their context as well as any other additional material which is developed and still under development in Greece. The purpose of this museum is to contribute to a complete and comprehensive presentation of the exhibits and their context which provides valuable help to the virtual visitors in understanding the museum exhibition. The outline navigation to the 3D space of the museum as well as the presentation certainly invite the virtual visitors to participate in an enhanced museum experience and in museum meaning-making virtual games are also added to the learning environment. In order to provide the opportunity for creative learning and entertainment at the same time.
STEPS UNDERTAKEN FOR THE CREATION OF THE E-MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS
i. Define potential virtual users
ii. Creation of a virtual museum exhibition
iii. Visualization of exhibition space
iv. Digitization of exhibits
iv. Digitization of 2D exhibits
v. Digitization of 3D objects
vii. Virtual museum functionalities
viii. Navigation to the temporary museum exhibition
viv. Examination of the exhibits
x. The gallery
xi. Educational games
xii. Quiz
xiii. Hidden treasure
xiv. The need for evaluation.
Haven identify the tools and techniques used for the design and the creation of the virtual Macedonian Museum of Modern Art. It is necessary to elaborate on their success stories and if possible reciprocate such in our clients. The museum is user-centered. It takes into account the user needs and it ensures efficient and effective content. The users are researchers and specialists of Contemporary Art as well as students or virtual tourists interested in Arts. It is created to satisfy the different profiles and characteristics. The potential users are interviewed now and then to get feedback on information. This has offered a more immersive impression and it is classical and attractive.
In the Macedonian Museum, they used the most usual structure for virtual exhibitions that is defined by the structure of exhibition spaces. Each exhibition space may represent an entire exhibition, a part of the exhibition related to a particular subject, a museum gallery, and so on. Subspaces may be used to divide exhibitions into smaller parts, for instance, focused on a particular topic. The exhibition spaces consist of two types of elements: The Virtual Galleries and the Cultural Objects. For their creation past research on or regarding the issues for consideration, concerning the 3D representations was taken into account. The virtual exhibits are the principal means through which the virtual museum will communicate its Missions, Visions, and objectives and they can be static or interactive. The key features of this online interactive exhibit are:
i. Multiplicity of contexts for the users to connect with the exhibit in a seamless manner.
ii. Good instructional design
iii. Pro-active learning contexts
iv. Good balance between learning and leisure
v. No text-heavy pages to interfere with the learning experience.
Moreover, in the last decades, there have been some basic efforts or some sought of reform to shift the focus from the aesthetic value of museum artifacts to their context as well as the historical information they encompass and the ideas they foster. This changing perspective led museums to concentrate on telling stories about the objects, thus enabling visitors to construct semantic meaning around them. Historical narratives communicated establish connectedness between the museum objects, visitors, and various layers of information concerning their past context and this exposes cultural objects to new audiences around the world. Just like the Macedonia Museum of Contemporary Art is doing all over the world.
Another important consideration for the design is visualization of exhibition space, either by imaging technology and visualized by means of 360 degrees or Quicktime VR technology developed by Apple. This allows animation and provides dynamic and continuous 3600 views. This method has been preferred among others because it is low-cost but easy-to-use and it has an efficient solution for enabling the users to experience and interact with the permanent collection of the museum exhibition.
Additionally, the increased efficiency of internet connections makes it possible to transmit significant media files relating to the Artifacts of the virtual museum exhibition. Thus virtual visitors can have access to the virtual Macedonian Art Exhibition via a PC and an internet connection at any given time and from any given location. Now the space of the collection was created by 3D Studio Max and visualized by Wedb3D technology. According to 2D digital drawings and accurate on-site measurements, a 3D model of temporary exhibition space was produced. Real textures from the building were used to produce a more photorealistic result. Internet technologies have the tremendous potential to offer virtual visitors ubiquitous access Via WWW (World Wide Web) to the virtual museum environment. The most popular technology for WWW visualization includes Web 3D which can offer tools such as VRML and X3D which can be used for the creation that is much more interactive than many current museum websites available, that is a catalogue of pictures and text in a web browser. The characteristic of Web 3D systems is that they can transform human-computer interaction techniques and allow the creation of a new category of interactive applications that could very well act as the catalyst for launching the virtual museum revolution.
However, the exhibits that were digitized for the creation of the e-museum of Macedonian were of different sizes shapes, and materials. The digitization process was different depending on the complexity and the form of the exhibits. It was divided into two major groups, two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects. Different techniques were used for each group ranging from photogrammetry to laser scanning. For the two-dimensional objects of the traditional photogrammetric techniques that were used, the exhibits were photographed using a high-resolution 10MP digital camera (Canon Eos 400D) with different lenses depending on the size of the object. Then, the images were rectified using the projective transformation. The final images have a pixel size resolution of 0.5mm. For the digitization of the 3-dimensional objects different techniques were employed depending on the complexity of the objects, an external orientation device was used and data was processed using photo modeler software. For the large objects, Optech ILRIS3D laser scanners were used to achieve the required result.
Meanwhile, a critical look at navigating to a permanent exhibition takes a long process because the functionality is both entertaining and educational. The examination of the exhibit must take place. Search and keywords about the exhibit in a virtual gallery must be actualized. Educational games to test the effectiveness and measure the impacts of the virtual museum has to be encouraged. An educational quiz will be provided to increase the motivation of the visitors and the most interesting part is the hidden treasure which is a game in which virtual visitors search for an exhibit with specific characteristics. He or she will be driven by instructions and will watch the part chosen and position to a grand plan. The game will present some levels of difficulty and also have a “Point system” connected to awards.
Wasa Gertrude Mobunubhata, Assistant Director Museums, National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Benin City, writes from Benin City.
