Show HN: A map of the world's virtual museums • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: A map of the world's virtual museums

#21

Post by panoramas4good » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 8:21 PM UTC

mektrik wrote: post #4

nicthesailor wrote: post #3

Just playing with it now, and I love the idea. Have you thought about adding the zoos and aquariums that are live-streaming their animals?

Thanks! Yeah I've definitely been tempted with adding more ideas like these. The one question I've struggled with, and would be super keen for your thoughts on, is whether it'd look okay to have them on the virtualmuseums.io domain, or whether you think it's worth starting again and trying to capture all the best 'virtual attractions' on a single map?

We've got 1000's of virtual tours of mountains / rivers / reefs / etc. in our library. Drop me an email if you do decide to expand the content (https://www.trekview.org/contact)

Re: Show HN: A map of the world's virtual museums

#22

Post by nh2 » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

tmilard wrote: post #19

wenc wrote: post #18

Thank you for creating this. As a museum lover (I've visited ~ 170 around the world), I struggle with getting into virtual tours. I wonder if anyone else feels that virtual museum tours are so far from ideal that it isn't worthwhile investing the time to browse? I can't seem to get into them -- not because of trivial reasons like "oh it's not like the real thing", but more like no one's been able to produce the right…

1) Not sure. I would say photos are usually quite ok. 2) Yes I agree: Those 360° photos are ok but the transition from one to the next is poor, even for google indoor-map as surprising as it sounds. The only good 360° photo technology is by far matterport. https://matterport.com 3) I would think it is ofen marketing. To market their museum. Photos, 100 years ago did not kill the "presence" in museums. Same for virtua…

You may want to check out our startup, it focuses on smooth transitions from just panorama photos.

https://benaco.com

It works quite nicely for museums and supports hosting everything on your own server / offline if needed. If you want to make your museum virtual, let me know!

As this is HN, you may also enjoy that almost the entire stack, from computer vision pipeline to the WebGL website, is written by 3 people in Haskell.

Re: Show HN: A map of the world's virtual museums

#23

Post by wenc » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:46 AM UTC

tmilard wrote: post #19

wenc wrote: post #18

Thank you for creating this. As a museum lover (I've visited ~ 170 around the world), I struggle with getting into virtual tours. I wonder if anyone else feels that virtual museum tours are so far from ideal that it isn't worthwhile investing the time to browse? I can't seem to get into them -- not because of trivial reasons like "oh it's not like the real thing", but more like no one's been able to produce the right…

1) Not sure. I would say photos are usually quite ok. 2) Yes I agree: Those 360° photos are ok but the transition from one to the next is poor, even for google indoor-map as surprising as it sounds. The only good 360° photo technology is by far matterport. https://matterport.com 3) I would think it is ofen marketing. To market their museum. Photos, 100 years ago did not kill the "presence" in museums. Same for virtua…

Thanks for your thoughts.

1) It depends on the site. It seems many are still quite low-res, not even as good as pictures taken on Instagram.

2) I wonder if 360° is the right approach. We typically don't need to experience the transition from exhibit to exhibit. We only need 360° around the exhibit. An adventure-game sprite may be good enough to move around the space and click on objects as needed.

3) Unless the virtual visits were actually good -- then part of the ticket sales might be affected. So the solution is to sell tickets for virtual tours (but they have to be really good)

4) Audio would be nice, just like the headset you can rent at many museums. What I meant though was more the grouping and sequence of the exhibits -- for instance when you walk through a special exhibit, the sequence tells the story. In virtual tours, because the collection is incompletely digitized, the story is broken.