I think I’m a little churlish about this whole “skeuomorphic museum exhibition” angle. I’ve worked in and with museum technology for 30 years, and run two businesses working with hundreds of cultural heritage / museum clients.

Although this is technically impressive, I’m just not entirely sure why. Like - I just don’t want to dwell here…

The whole idea that you have to be in some kind of virtual 3D space just seems a little bit 1998 for me. When I worked at the Science Museum in the early 2000’s for example we were thinking about VRML and I was out on gallery shooting 3D pans and knitting them together for the web. Back then it did feel like there was a “if you can’t visit, here’s the next best thing” and that this should be “a virtual reality space online”.

But I think we’ve moved on. Museums have been making online exhibitions that are much more than just “a recreation of the real space online” for 20+ years - many of them are now really good at this. Take a look at someone like the Wellcome Collection [0] stories for example. They’re using the medium really well, they’re writing brilliantly, they’re knitting together fascinating relationships between items. The editorial is brilliant. The insights are brilliant. The linkages are brilliant. And as a consequence of all this, you end up wanting to stay.

Not to knock the OP, it’s nice - I like it, it’s slick, it’s well done, and anyone who gets anything out the door deserves a pat on the back - but I’m not sure it works as an engaging mechanism. Not for me, anyway.

[0] https://wellcomecollection.org/stories

One voice out of billions.

Sales lesson: find those who like your product, ignore the rest.

I am on the pro digital twin page. Definitely.

1998 is a qualifier for what exactly? I didn’t get it since by your own account you admitted that the app is impressive.

Why do you take pictures? Why do we like sketches and diagrams? Information visualization is supporting our specie’s propensity for everything that is concrete. Imagination and image are related for a reason.

“Picture this!” Is another paraphrase.

I want to relive or augment my visits as well as get to know certain venues and the fact that it is rather easy now to build such copies even with frequent updates makes me frolicking.

Exactly this, it’s something that keeps being thrown around for new project ideas in cultural heritage for decades. And there is a metric ton of prior art. But there is no clear value proposition, and if for some reason someone pushes it through it sits unused for a few months or years and gets sunset after someone forgets it exists.

Great tech demo. These projects need demand and drive from the public, and there isn’t any. It’s also missing the deeper motivations of why people visit museums and cultural institutions.

I think it has its place. Ironically I just literally tasked Opus 5.5 with modeling the entire 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition so I can walk around it.

There is something about experiencing scale in context. For sculptures this can be important and for other large scale art as well.

Thank you for the Wellcome link and the feedback. I guess our target group is a different one, people who do not like to read long essays and therefore we tried to keep it short. So each stop has only a few plain sentences. And a bit more in the extended view. But sure, you are right that good writing is what makes people stay. That´s a point we still have to improve. Also for the walk we had the idea to bring everything together, his paintings, machines, notebooks and anatomy drawings, in one place you can walk through.

I could see this being true for paintings, and especially if your primary interest is the meta.

For anything experiential, a virtual environment makes a kind of sense to me. Is it stained glass or sculpture or armor or a painting? How big is it? Does perspective or lighting matter at all? Do I care if the artist died of dysentery? Is the place the art?

Depending on those, I think I can understand. Otherwise, sure, a picture or panning widget and some wiki text is fine.

But also I’m just some goof on the internet and not an expert on anything.