Recreating reality
The fundamental objective of every cultural foundation is the conveyance of its messages in any possible way. The display of its collections and exhibitions but also their accessibility to the public is the museums main concern. The digital means enable us to visit museums and monuments in all longitudes and latitudes relatively easily. Creating a realistic virtual tour opens the museum to the wider internet audience and makes the participation of all visitor groups to its wealth possible. Apart from these obvious benefits of a virtual tour, places that may be dangerous, remote, inaccessible, or sensitive become accessible to a wide audience.
Moreover, a virtual tour installation helps in the case of temporary exhibitions. So far, the cost and man hours needed for the creation of a major temporary exhibition would get lost upon its completion. What is left from a temporary exhibition that has finished are photographs and videos. However, a virtual tour renders every temporary exhibition immortal and enables its visitors to wander around its space ‘live’. For the creation of such tours, we can use the state-of-the art in quality and acutance cameras of Materport and Leica in which the tours are offered either through a computer or through museum screens or even with 3D glasses (Oculus). What characterises such tours are their acutance, the ability to post external links, pop-up captions, the automatic creation of architectonic plans, zoom in and zoom out functions, ability of capturing 360° photographs, indoor and outdoor shooting, and the ability to measure the dimensions of any exhibit or special building.
