Building a VR-Museum in a Museum

Past years have seen the exploitation of multimedia techniques and lately the introduction of virtual reality methods to create new forms of presentation for museums' exhibitions. Virtual Reality can offer a number of advantages to museums, offering a way to overcome some common problems like the lack of space or the need of visitors to interact with the exhibits. A broad categorisation of virtual museums reveals that they vary from fully immersive cave systems to simple multimedia presentations. In our approach to develop a virtual reality museum we have designed a virtual environment (VE) where guests can visit a total of ten different museums. The processes of digitisation, architectural design and exhibit presentation are outlined and points of particular importance are explained. Exhibits from the real world museums have been digitised and integrated in the VE. The system has been implemented in two versions: one fully immersive and one with a stereo display.