Museums aren’t renowned for being the most forward thinking of places, but there are signs of them slowly moving with the times.  For instance, I wrote recently about a project undertaken at the Guggenheim in New York that aims to place visitors fully into the art they’re viewing.

Visitors are first placed in a marketplace of possible future worlds.  These include things such as bloodless wars or weather we can manage.

Visitors are given 10,000 units of currency that they can then use to invest in the futures they like the most.  Currency can be earned by sharing various insights and articles related to each future.

The trading activity in each platform is then shown in a visual display that demonstrates market activity in real-time to allow visitors to see which of the futures appear to be gaining traction.

Virtual tours

Of course, with things like virtual reality, the question is whether you actually need to be physically in the museum to enjoy its exhibits.  The British Museum are a prime example, with ‘visitors’ able to tour its works anywhere and everywhere using nothing but their smartphone.

The project is a partnership with the Google Cultural Institute, who have used the technology utilized by Street View to record the full nine floors and 85 galleries of the museum.

It will allow anyone with a web connection to browse the 80,000 or so artifacts that are on display at any one time.  Visitors begin their ‘tour’ in the Great Court, which is the largest public square in Europe.

The images themselves were captured during the hours before and after the museum is open to the public, and the emptiness of the vast space has an eerie quality to it.

The work with the British Museum is the latest in Google’s attempts to bring Street View technology to places such as Carnegie Hall and Pompeii and over 300 museums and galleries around the world.

The British Museum project is undoubtedly the largest undertaking the team have attempted however.

“The British Museum was founded on the principle to tell the story of the whole world to the people of the world,” the museum say. “We’re a museum built on sharing.”

It’s certainly an interesting project, and whilst it obviously won’t recreate the ambiance of physically being in such a stunning building, it does at least bring the works to a wider audience than can physically attend each of the museums currently covered.