Sounds like science fiction? Not at Europeana! Soon, everything described above will be reality. Not a physical reality but a virtual one. With the advent of 3D computing and affordable head-mounted displays (HMDs) it is already possible to walk around in virtual representations of buildings, cities and other settings. In these virtual worlds, everything is digital so the physical constraints as we know them – things like time, distance and gravity – simply do not apply.
Sounds like science fiction? Not at Europeana! Soon, everything described above will be reality. Not a physical reality but a virtual one. With the advent of 3D computing and affordable head-mounted displays (HMDs) it is already possible to walk around in virtual representations of buildings, cities and other settings. In these virtual worlds, everything is digital so the physical constraints as we know them – things like time, distance and gravity – simply do not apply.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcVIEASVII
Virtual cultural heritage experience
Virtual reality will offer great opportunities for the world of museums, galleries and archives. A first step would be to recreate existing museums online so that people from all over the world could visit them from exactly where they are. And then each of us could curate collections and put them in an environment of our choosing: how about looking at some of Rembrandt’s paintings in one of the workshops he worked in? Or what about a museum in which you could change the entire collection with a press of a button? How about stepping into a painting from Monet and being able to walk around the water-lily pond?
At Europeana, we have been experimenting with this new technology. We asked the Dutch design agency ArchiVisionto develop a 3D model of a small fictional museum (the ‘EUseum’) in which you can marvel at some of the masterpieces from the Dutch Rijksmuseum. For this demo, we used a development kit for the Oculus Rift virtual reality glasses. Using the headset, you can ‘walk’ around and see the paintings at much closer range than would be possible in reality. When you turn your head, your view changes accordingly, giving you a sense of actually being in the virtual museum. To get the idea, just watch the video in which you’ll see some of our staff members enjoying the demo!
We think that virtual reality combined with the diverse and fascinating collections you can find in Europeana make a great combination. And we’d love to support you if you’d like to try developing a virtual museum experience or culture-related game of your own. If you are fortunate enough to own the Oculus Rift development kit, you can download the demo for Windows and OS X and get started now. Please contact Wiebe de Jager (wiebe.dejager at kb.nl) for more information or if you’ve got an idea we could help with.
External links
ArchiVision
Europeana
Virtual museum demo download page
About Europeana
Europeana is the trusted source of cultural heritage brought to you by the Europeana Foundation and a large number of European cultural institutions, projects and partners. It’s a real piece of team work.
Explore millions of items from a range of Europe’s leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Books and manuscripts, photos and paintings, television and film, sculpture and crafts, diaries and maps, sheet music and recordings, they’re all here. No need to travel the continent, either physically or virtually!
About ArchiVision
ArchiVision is specialized in designing and creating virtual presentations since 1995. Apart from a broad and up-to-date knowledge concerning 3D visualizations and interaction trough out the company. We cover the entire scope of visual and virtual presentations: from live action films to animations, from 2D and 3D presentations to augmented reality. We make your ideas become reality, or we can develop a concept based on your briefing. You name it, we create it!
For more information about the paintings in the demo please visit the europeana blog post
