The Use of Virtual Museums, Simulations, and Recreations as Educational Tools

Abstract

The idea of creating a virtual museum is far from new. However, creating a museum that an archaeologist could customize to match his needs is quite innovative. Here we present a system which can be used for online visualization of museums. Although there are plenty of online virtual museums, none of them is customizable. These museums are designed statically and represent certain museums, which makes it rather difficult to change. On the contrary, our Dynamic Virtual Museum is easily managed through database entries, which provide all necessary variables (rooms, models, exhibits) and interact with the renderer through scripts. Therefore, the virtual museum can be easily transformed to match any given exhibition or a visitor’s specific choices. The system consists of two main elements, a database where all information about the exhibits, models, and so forth, is kept and a renderer which is responsible for graphically representing all this information on the computer screen.