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.