A view inside the Virtual Exhibition
Source: Museum Victoria
You can now wander through The Melbourne Story from home thanks to a new interactive virtual tour on the exhibition’s website. The tour, produced completely in-house by Museum Victoria, allows web visitors to explore the exhibition and watch videos of curators talking about their favourite objects.
The Virtual Exhibition uses a technique called cubic panorama to mimic the logical path visitors take through the exhibition. To generate to the tour, a camera with a 180º fish-eye lens captured five images – four in the horizontal plane and one looking straight up – at 22 key nodes. Next, the overlapping images were stitched together with computer software. The embedded videos present an extra interactive layer with fascinating stories behind the exhibits.
Teachers who are planning class trips can use the Virtual Exhibition to preview The Melbourne Story's size and content. It's also useful for people who are unable to visit in person and has great potential for archiving exhibitions so they can still be ‘visited’ after they have closed.
More panoramas are planned for the future; a virtual tour of the Royal Exhibition Building is in development and will be released in coming months.
View the Virtual Exhibition now.
Handy tips: The tour is best enjoyed in full screen mode by clicking the yellow button in the lower right corner. Click on the blue arrows or drag the mouse to travel around the gallery.