Virtual tours offered at other museums

• Exhibits tag

• Post Date: 06/08/2020
• Author: Seetha Ramaswamy, IT student
• Reading Time: 4 minute read

A lot of museums around the world have digital content that can be accessed for free. These exhibits are creative, engaging, and visually stunning and we wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the online museum content that has captured our attention recently. In this post, we want to look at some of the virtual tours that other museums are offering. Make sure to also check out our previous blog post about available resources the Spurlock Museum has available!

These museums offer virtual 360° tours of their exhibit(s)/museum. Imitating the experience of walking through the museum, these tours allow you to click through the actual exhibit and look at different objects.

Benaki Museum

The Benaki Museum (external link) based in Athens, Greece has several 360° tours you can explore: the Museum of Greek Culture (external link), the Museum of Islamic Art (external link), and the Ghika Gallery (external link). While you navigate through the galleries, certain objects will be marked with a plus sign when they have additional audio components explaining them further. Each tour has a floor plan in the bottom corner you can use to go to other galleries, and pictures next to the floor plan that you can click in order to go to specific areas in the chosen gallery.

Taiwan National Palace Museum

The Taiwan National Palace Museum (external link) houses 698,766 Chinese cultural artifacts. The National Palace Museum’s “720° virtual tour” (external link) allows you to visit the Museum’s permanent exhibits. The tour has 2 options: you can click and “walk” through the museum to find objects marked with an “i” that have additional text, pictures, and audio or you can use the provided guides that allow you to quickly find selected objects.

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia (external link) “uses objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice.” The Jim Crow Museum’s virtual tour (external link) allows you to navigate through the museum and explore these objects. The circles allow you to access a voice recording of the information panels in the museum. The floor plan option at the bottom allows you to access all the information panels at once, or to immediately go to another area of the museum.

National Museum of Singapore

The National Museum of Singapore (external link) features a virtual tour of their exhibit An Old New World: From the East Indies to the Founding of Singapore, 1600s–1819 (external link). This exhibit “features personal collections from the families of Stamford Raffles and William Farquhar, as well as treasures from international museums such as the Royal Collections Trust, London to highlights from our National Collection.” There are two different options to explore this digital edition: there are two guided tours narrated by two curators on the themes of Knowledge and Power and Seeing the Indigenous, and a self-exploratory option.