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 virtual visits... Nothing to worry about.
4) Yes, I also think an audio comment would add a lot. I wonder why no 360° visit does this...
Thierry https://free-visit.net
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.
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.
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 UI for enjoying a museum. Even Google's Art and Culture indoor maps of museums is only good for 5 minutes of amusement and not worth bothering with again. I clicked on several links in the comments and was like, eh -- doesn't really hold my interest (though if I were physically at the museum I'd be spending hours).
I wonder if these are factors:
1) Lack of good photography. Most museums tend to be dark, so you need professional photographers who know how to work with low-light photography. Also most pictures/videos tend to be low res for some reason, which takes away from the enjoyment. I wonder if most museums are loath to make high-res photography available for free because it cannibalizes their admissions.
Google Arts and Culture has some high-res artwork, but the selection is extremely limited.
2) Unwieldy ways to move in space. Google indoor maps, which has a FPS (first person shooter) interface, isn't the most natural to navigate, because it doesn't match how people actually experience a museum. I wonder if instead of an FPS perspective, an adventure-game orthographic view might make more sense? It would let you walk around the museum and click on objects to interact with them. Also let's face it -- professional museum goers will tell you that they are extremely selective and don't interact with all exhibits, so a frictionless way to preview and skip exhibits is key.
3) Limited/non-comprehensive collection. Usually only the less interesting collections are online. (not always true, but generally true). This is likely due to the cost of putting entire collections online, and there not being a lot of payoff -- unless it was possible to create a UI good enough to support monetization.
4) Lack of a cohesive story. Because only select pieces are on display online, the experience is disjointed, vs browsing a physical section of the museum which groups like objects together. The best museum story I've ever come across was the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which told a chronological story.
Does anyone know of any museum virtual tours that don't suffer from these issues?