In a recent issue of wired news (www.wired.com), you can find the
following:
http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/6550.html
Considering the Virtual Museum
by Austin Bunn
6:02pm 2.Sep.97.PDT Le Louvre has spent centuries
adapting to the crowds that flock to Winged Nike,
The Dying Slave, and, of course, da Vinci's
Plexiglas-protected Mona Lisa. But at this week's
International Conference on Hypermedia and
Interactivity, curators, academics, and museum
directors have come together at the French
museum in part to strategize how to reverse the
human tide by taking their collections directly to
the public - in effect, to turn the centralized
museum inside out.
"I imagine consumer services which will be
subscription based - you'll get the grand opening
of the week, 52 weeks a year, delivered to [the
computer] and you'll be making cocktail
conversation over that," says conference organizer
David Bearman.
This concept of the "distributed" museum had its
first trial run this summer with the VR exhibition
"Captain James Cook's Voyage on the Endeavor"
at the Natural History Museum in London. The
exhibit, which lets users wander aboard a
photorealistic version of the 18th century brig that
first mapped Australia, is part of a new European
Union initiative to explore new telecommunications
technology. Simply to prove it is possible, all the
data for the real-time VR navigation - including
sound, video, and images - is cached on servers in
Belgium and transmitted on the fly over a
dedicated ATM line.
Essentially, the server technology itself, developed
by Germany supercomputing company Parsytec,
is a key part of the exhibition, explains the
museum's new media designer, James Johnson.
"We're talking about servers which have to deliver
hundreds if not thousands of full-screen videos
simultaneously," says Johnson. "But the end user
wouldn't know if it was coming locally or not."
Johnson says this networked exhibition is just the
first stage of a drive into people's homes. The
following phase, to begin this fall, will begin
looking to developing a video-on-demand network
of exhibitions in Belgium. It may be too early to
expect much, he cautions. "Their set-top boxes
won't have the capacity for full-scale VR, but when
cable modems become common, then people in
their homes will have the capacity to see [the
exhibition]," says Johnson.
The effort engaged in whole-hearted European
boosterism, Johnson adds - "a model of
international partnership." Including the processor,
the rendering of the Endeavor was completed by a
Swiss architecture firm, and Paterborn University
in Germany created the VR application to run
everything.
But with the "distributed exhibit" format, museums
need to be careful about "diluting" the power a
museum has to convey information in situ, says
curator Carl Goodman at the American Museum
for the Moving Image. "VR gives you the sense of
a place without a sense of interpretation,"
Goodman says.
Goodman says European institutions have largely
taken the lead in exploring the technology
because of the money available to explore ways to
preserve their cultural heritage. "This is one area
where [the US] is envious," Goodman says.
"There is, of course, a trade-off - we're not
socialist."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED
magazine.
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