Visiting virtual reality museum exhibits

Summary form only given. Virtual museums provide ways to capture the content of a real museum in a digital (electronic) form and make this digital form more universally available. This exhibit demonstrates a novel method for digitally recording entire museum exhibits and allowing them to be explored in virtual reality. The methodology allows anyone with access to the Internet or a PC to experience anywhere, anytime, any part of the museum's collection or exhibits (past, present and future). Users can explore the museum exhibits in a virtual reality that is both spatially accurate and visually compelling. All objects and 3D scenes are seen in precise full color photographic quality detail. The scene and objects are polygonal meshes representing the surfaces of objects as recorded by a laser range finder. This permits making measurements directly on the scene with millimeter precision. The methodology, its application to capturing museum exhibits, and examples of exhibits recorded using this technique is demonstrated on a laptop PC. Visitors to the demonstration are able to learn about the process of digitizing 3D environments like museum exhibits and creating virtual reality environments from them. Place themselves in one of three virtual reality exhibits and explore the multiple rooms and artifacts comprising the exhibits (Ackland Art Museum, living room, Clue murder scene).