:: Museums in Inhabited Virtual Worlds ::

The installation of 3D graphical museums and galleries in multi-user worlds is not a new idea (I built my own first art gallery in my ActiveWorlds world back in around 1997, and mine too was far from the first ever built). The number of new museums in virtual inhabited worlds has proliferated in the past couple of years, however, primarily due to the popularity, in general as an immersive environment, of Second Life and consequently the opportunities for translating real-world institutions into globally accessible virtual spaces.

This unit of the course will be structured as follows:

• a general overview of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) and of Second Life in particular (you will need to have a Second Life account for this)
  
• an exploration and review of some of the museums, and of some of the museum groups, in Second Life. Museums by genre:
• art museums and galleries (Louvre, ...)
• science museums (Splo, the Palaeozoic Museum, ...)
  
• reconstructions of historical monuments and buildings (Renaissance Island, the Tower of London, the Basilica of St Francis, ...)
  
• other / unclassified (Death by Design, ...)
  
• a reading of some of the published literature (conference papers, journal papers, blogs, etc) on museums in MUVEs, and a group discussion of the readings
• a consideration of some of the attendant conceptual and theoretical issues, for example: what is the point of building 3D museums? ('edutainment'? frameworks for e-learning? enabling armchair access to geographically remote or dispersed collections? promotion of their real-world equivalents?) should virtual museums replicate bricks-and-mortar real-world museums? what is (should be, could be) the relationship between the historical artefact and its digital representation?

Online resources and directories

• List of museums and galleries in Second Life
  » http://www.slhistory.org/index.php/List_of_museums_and_galleries_in_Second_Life
  
• Stepping into History
  In-world virtual conference on history and heritage
  » http://steppingintohistory.org
• See also:
  the Google group Museums in Second Life
  » http://groups.google.com/group/SLmuseums
  and:
  Museums and Second Life at MuseumBlogging.com
  » http://www.museumblogging.com/2006/08/museums-and-second-life.html

Examples

The International Spaceflight Museum"The International Spaceflight Museum is a museum in the virtual world of Second Life. It hosts exhibits and events about real-world spacecraft, rockets, and space travel. The museum is located on the island sim Spaceport Alpha." Katherine Cochrane, founder of the museum, writes in the Proceedings of the First Second Life Education Workshop (2006):

"The International Spaceflight Museum (ISM) is a real museum, with educational goals and high standards of building and scholarship, that happens to exist only within the virtual world of Second Life.Unlike many other educational projects in the ISM was conceived and executed completely independent of any real world organization, by people who met one another in SL and decided that creating and operating such a museum would be a worthwhile, fun project.The items in the museum’s collection fall into several broad categories: spacecraft (historic rockets, space probes, space stations and landers), astronomy-related objects (planet/solar system models and a planetarium), space-related artwork and posters, and guest exhibits. Our spacecraft include over 50 full-scale models of launch vehicles and sounding rockets from the space agencies of over a dozen countries, and two from a private space company. Scaled Composites, private enterprise builders of the XPrize winner, SpaceShip One and its launch plane, the White Knight, provided us with drawings that enabled us to create accurate models of these historic craft."

» http://slispaceflightmuseum.org

The Cape Able Art Gallery
In light of its being a virtual environment, Second Life is an ideal social medium for the disabled. The Cape Able Art Gallery, a project of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, "feature[s] an exhibition of the works of hearing-impaired artists Ellie Kidder (aka Hope McAlpine) and Ronin1Shippe. The gala [launch] event was hosted by Cape Able Estate Manager Treasure Ballinger. Cape Able was recently acquired by Virtual Ability Inc., a federally licensed 501 c3 non-profit corporation whose mission it is to assist people with disabilities who wish to explore SL and virtual reality environments. The event celebrated a splendid new building to house the gallery and the riveting and whimsical art ofthese two very talented artists."


» http://www.metaversemessenger.com/pdf/2009/03/MM20090303.pdf
» http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cape%20Able/98/127/25

The Palaeozoic Museum
» http://slurl.com/secondlife/Babbage%20Square/199/178/112

Death by Design

Readings

Urban, R., Marty, P., & Twidale, M. (2007). ' A Second Life for Your Museum: 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments and Museums'. Paper presented at Museums and the Web 2007, San Francisco, California, April 11-14, 2007. [Web]