The Virtual 3D Social Experience Museum

The goal of the project The Virtual 3D Social Experience Museum is to provide a community platform for the presentation, discussion, annotation and the experience of cultural artefacts all blended together in a multi-user virtual environment with Web 2.0 capabilities for user-generated content The benefit for the visitor is to explore and to annotate the wealth of cultural heritage starting from one virtual place where objects from geographically and culturally disparate real places are brought together to create a holistic experience. For the museum as content provider the benefit is an easy to follow avenue to engage the visitor in a dialogue that will lead to a deeper understanding of the visitors` needs and expectations for the real museum or heritage site. Moreover, since visitors are able to annotate and to create content, the entire set of artefacts can be semantically enriched. In cooperation with the Museum and the Library of the City of Vienna a showcase will be developed either addressing the temporary exhibition Vienna 1930 or parts of the museum`s permanent collection extended with artefacts of the Library. The visitor contributions to the showcase will be analysed to provide the museum with feedback on visitor reception. In particular we will provide content analysis of textual annotations, social network analysis of contributing visitors, as well as general analysis of interaction patterns with the exhibition.

With the project "The virtual 3D social experience museum" we used techniques from computer science to present objects of cultural heritage. We specialised on art history and paintings. We addressed the following three parts during the project. (1) Presentation of artworks in context In this part of the project we addressed alternative principles of describing artworks. Therefore, a web-platform was developed that, rather than using descriptive textual information, presents an artwork in context with other works of art along different contextual categories (http://www.explorartorium.info/). By exploratively comparing the artworks, the users shall develop a sense for the context of an artwork. The central idea is to have one painting in the centre and seven categories of contextual paintings showing up to five paintings per context category. The context categories are the artist, the title of the painting, the country of origin of the painter, the topical class of the painting and the time epoch of the painting. In addition there is also a random collection of paintings and a history showing the last seen paintings. Analysis of interaction shows that the users of the explorARTorium use these categories to explore our collection of paintings. Another important concept of the explorARTorium is to include the users in the process of generating information about the artworks. Therefore users are able to annotate (tag) artworks, and at the same time see the tags of the other users. The visualization of these tags as tag-clouds provides an additional layer of information and contextualization among the different contextual categories. Further analysis of the collected tags shows interesting insights in the perception of art among our users. (2) Serious games for art history Serious games are games that are developed for purposes other than mere entertainment. Normally, serious games are used to teach the player something. Ideally, the player does not realize that the purpose of the game is education. During the project we developed a 3D role-playing game ThIATRO (http://vsem.ec.tuwien.ac.at/thiatro/) and a casual mobile game ARTournament. With the role-playing game the players act as curators that select paintings for special exhibitions from other museum. The various exhibitions are organized in game levels that let the players deal with topics in art history. In the mobile game the players played through various levels. On each round in a level the one painting fulfilling the topic of the level has to be selected from four paintings shown. Both games demonstrated that the players successfully gained knowledge about art history from playing the game. (3) Art history as a network structure Artworks are products of human creativity. Obviously, their creation process also underlies social influences on their creators. Those influences originate from co-working- and teacher scholar episodes but also from economic relationships between people. This part of the project examined such art-historical network structures with a particular focus on the comparison of professionally curated data sources such as the Getty Union List of Artist Names with crowd-sourced data such as from Wikipedia. Results include structural differences between these professional and "amateur" data sources and interesting biases occurring in different language editions of Wikipedia