CIP A 2005 XX International Symposium, 26 September - 01 October, 2005, Torino, Italy 
1138 
VIRTUAL MUSEUMS: FIRST RESULTS OF A SURVEY ON METHODS AND TOOLS 
Sylaiou S. 1 , Liarokapis F. 2 , Sechidis L. 1 , Patias P. 1 , Georgoula O. 1 
1 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 
svlaiou@photo.topo.auth.gr , lazikas@photo.topo.auth.gr , patias@topo.auth.gr . olge@topo.auth.gr 
2 City University, London, U.K - fotisl@soi.city.ac.uk 
KEY WORDS: Cultural Heritage, Virtual Museum, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Web3D 
ABSTRACT 
Museums are interested in digitizing their collections in order not only to preserve the cultural information, but also to make it 
available to the wide public in an attractive manner. Emerging technologies, such as VR, AR and Web3D are widely used for 
creating virtual museum exhibitions in a museum environment through informative kiosks and on the World Wide Web. This paper 
makes a survey in the field and explores the various kinds of virtual museums, their advantages and limitations by presenting old and 
new methods and tools used for their creation. 
1 INTRODUCTION 
The development of interactive techniques and information 
technologies’ software and hardware, in conjunction with the 
decreasing of their costs have facilitated their use by a wide 
range of cultural institutions, such as museums. These new 
technologies provided solutions for lack of exhibition space, 
considerable exhibitions’ costs and the fragility of some 
artefacts that museum curators want to prevent their possible 
damage. The value of the new methods and tools has been 
recognized and fruitfully exploited by curators for visualizing 
the cultural context of museum exhibitions (Scali et al. 2002), 
(Web 1). Conferences such as ICHIM Conferences on 
Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, which started in 
1991 and Museums and the Web, which was established in 
1997, underline the importance of new technologies to 
museums. The utility and the potential benefits of emerging 
technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) (Pletinckx 2000), 
(Roussou 2001), Augmented Reality (AR) (Brogni et al. 1999) 
and Web technologies (White et al. 2004), (Sinclair and 
Martinez 2001) to museums have been well documented. 
Museums changed drastically their way of conveying 
information about their exhibitions to the wide public. They 
have started to make use of innovative methods and new 
communication tools for creating virtual museums that made the 
content and context of the museum collections more accessible 
and aesthetically pleasing to the wide public. A virtual museum 
can be presented either to a CD-ROM, or over the World Wide 
Web, or even to an intranet in a museum environment. It can be 
an extension of a physical museum, or it can exist only in a 
digital form. Sometimes it is a 3D reconstruction of the physical 
museum, like the exhibition ‘010101: Art in Technological 
Times’ (Web 2), where in the virtual rooms of the museum 
exhibition, the visitors can navigate and explore its collections. 
Alternatively, it may be a completely imaginary environment, in 
form of various rooms, where the cultural artifacts are placed 
(Web 3). 
This paper will not present the results of a research, because its 
main aim is to provide the first results of a survey about the 
current state-of-the-art of virtual museums. It will present 
virtual museum exhibitions and their characteristics and 
highlight the potential of virtual museums. The structure of the 
article is organized as follows: in the first section there is an 
introduction to the survey about virtual museums. In the second 
section the emerging methods and tools used by virtual 
museums are presented. Then, the benefits, which arise from the 
use of virtual museums by various groups of end-users, are 
examined. Finally, the conclusions of the paper are provided in 
the last section. 
2 EMERGING METHODS AND TOOLS USED BY 
VIRTUAL MUSEUMS 
Museum curators make use of new technologies for digitizing 
information about exhibitions’ artifacts, as well as for 
displaying and spreading the cultural information to the wide 
public in an appealing and effective way. Methods and tools 
that have emerged as areas of extreme interest make it possible 
to provide customized interfaces of virtual museum exhibitions 
in a number of ways. For example, many interaction devices are 
now available that can be integrated into multi-modal Virtual 
and Augmented Reality interactive interfaces. 
Virtual museum exhibitions can present the digitized 
information about cultural objects, either in a museum 
environment (e.g. in touchscreen kiosks), or over the World 
Wide Web. The first applications in the area were mainly 
focused on static presentations of texts and photos concerning 
museums that offered their information through web-sites with a 
catalogue of texts and photos. Later on, more sophisticated 
means have appeared and the exhibits were rather dynamic and 
interactive than static in nature and authoritative (Worden 
1997). Thus, these virtual museums provided a more close to 
reality approach and an enhanced experience to their virtual 
visitors. In this section, a brief overview of the most 
characteristic methods and tools currently used for the 
generation of virtual museum exhibitions are presented. 
2.1 Virtual Reality Exhibitions 
In a Virtual Reality environment the user gets immersed in an 
artificial world. Heim says that weak Virtual Reality can be 
characterized by the appearance of a 3D environment on a 2D 
screen (Figure 1, 2), (Heim 1993). 
In opposition to this, strong Virtual Reality is the total sensory 
immersion, which comprises wearing a device like a Head- 
Mounted Display, or 3D polarizing stereoscopic glasses, or even 
a glove, in order to create a feeling of control in actual space 
(ibid). Two indicative example are Kivotos (Ark) and Magic 
Screen that are housed in ‘Hellenic Cosmos’, the Cultural 
Center of the Foundation of Hellenic World in Greece (Web 5). 
Kivotos is a Virtual Reality environment in a room of three 
meters by three meters, where the walls and the floor act like 
projection screens and in which visitors participate in a journey 
by wearing stereoscopic 3D glasses and using a ‘magic wand’ 
(Figure 3). The other VR installation, Magic Screen is shaped 
like a table and visitors can engage themselves in similar 
interactive activities and explore through navigation the virtual 
environment (Figure 4) (Gaitatzes et al. 2001).