Virtual Museums - An Educational Experience From the Comfort of Your Pyjamas!

The field trip to the museum: playtime for the students, Advil-time for the teacher! Ok I’m being a little melodramatic. Visiting a museum is an awesome experience and there is no replacement for being there in person. But it’s a major excursion to organize and supervise. Plus your destinations are limited. A trip to the Lourve or the Smithsonian is not usually in the budget.

Enter high speed internet and online virtual software and you’ve got yourself a virtual museum tour. It’s not the real thing, but the price is $0 and you can cover a lot of ground on your own schedule.

As I explored some virtual museums I realized that another benefit of these virtual tours was as preparation before I went there myself. I visited the Louvre with my parents at age 16. It was a fantastic experience, but it was also a huge place that was frankly quite overwhelming. I think that if we had spent some time before the trip exploring the virtual museum first, I would have derived more pleasure and learning from my in-person visit.

There are a multitude of educational virtual tours and museums. Here are the best 3 I have discovered:

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History - Panoramic Virtual Tour

It is part of the largest museum complex in the world run by the Smithsonian Institution; it is a complex of 19 museums and research centers. Ever since I saw the movie “Night At The Musuem 2” I have wanted to visit the Smithsonian. Until that time I can get a taste with an impressive and easy to use virtual tour.

You can enter the rotunda and go for the comprehensive self-guided, room-by-room walking tour of the whole museum. Directional arrows and a few controls help to guide you around the exhibits. You can directly go to a spot by using the map. If you see an icon of a camera, clicking on it displays the exhibit in close-up.

Warning: this visual-amazing virtual tour requires a high bandwidth internet connection

Louvre - Virtual Tours

As I mentioned earlier, this is the one museum on this list that I have been to. The Louvre has an amazing collection of art objects as well as being an architectural beauty. There are separate virtual tours of the museum, which cover different sections of the museum. You can witness the architectural splendor from the outside and then go inside to the different sections. An inline QuickTime player gives you pan and zoom controls to close in on the exhibits. You can see a listing of all the virtual tours around the museum on the left sidebar. My favorite tour when I visited in person is also my favorite tour in virtual mode too: the Medieval Louvre.

Vatican Museums - Collections Online

Wow. Paintings, frescoes and sculptures. The highlight here is clearly the 360 virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. There also links to some collections you can view in a little java player.

There are a multitude of additional virtual museums and tours online. Google to your hearts content. I would also recommend searching for virtual tours in Second Life. Start here, at the Second Life search page [search term: Historical]

Happy perusing.