Virtual museums: First results of a survey on methods and tools Sylaiou S. 1 , Liarokapis F. 2 , Sechidis L. 1 , Patias P. 1 , Georgoula O. 1 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 1 sylaiou@photo.topo.auth.gr , lazikas@photo.topo.auth.gr , patias@topo.auth.gr . olge@topo.auth.gr City University, London, U.K. 2 fotisl@soi.city.ac.uk Keywords: Cultural Heritage, Virtual Museum, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Web3D Abstract Museums are interested in digitizing their collections in order not only to preserve the cultural information, but also to make it available to the wide public in an attractive manner. Emerging technologies, such as VR, AR and Web3D are widely used for creating virtual museum exhibitions in a museum environment through informative kiosks and on the World Wide Web. This paper makes a survey in the field and explores the various kinds of virtual museums, their advantages and limitations by presenting old and new methods and tools used for their creation. 1 Introduction Τhe increasing development of interactive techniques and new information technologies’ software and hardware and the decreasing of their costs have facilitated their use by a wide range of cultural institutions, such as museums. These new technologies also provided solutions for lack of exhibition space, considerable exhibitions’ costs and the fragility of some artefacts that museum curators want to prevent their possible damage. The value of these new tools and formats have been recognized and fruitfully exploited by curators for visualizing the cultural context of museum exhibitions (Scali et al. 2002), (Web 1). Conferences such as ICHIM Conferences on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums, which started in 1991 and Museums and the Web, which was established in 1997, underline the importance of new technologies to museums. The utility and the potential benefits of emerging technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) (Pletinckx 2000), (Roussou 2001), Augmented Reality (AR) (Brogni et al. 1999) and Web technologies (White et al. 2004), (Sinclair and Martinez 2001) to museums have been well documented. Museums changed their way of conveying information about their cultural artifacts to the wide public. Through innovative methods that have provided to be valuable tools, new communication methods, like virtual museums have been created and they have made the content and context of the museum collections more accessible and attractive to the wide public. The last decade various kinds of ‘virtual museums’ have been developed either in the museums’ environment, or over the World Wide Web. Α virtual museum can be a digital collection that is presented either over the Web, or to an intranet or even to a CD-ROM and it can be an extension of a physical museum, or it can exist only in a digital form. Also, the virtual museum can have various forms. It can be a 3D reconstruction of the physical museum, like the exhibition ‘010101: Art in Technological Times’ (Web 2), where in the virtual rooms of the museum exhibition, the visitors can navigate and explore its collections. Alternatively, it can be a completely imaginary environment, in form of various rooms, where the cultural artifacts are placed (Web 3). This paper will not present the results of a research, because its main aim is to provide information collected by a first survey of the current state-of-the- art of virtual museums. The limited space prevents the presentation of the full results of the survey. It will present virtual museum exhibitions and their characteristics and highlight the potential of virtual museums. The structure of the article is organized as follows: in the first section there is an introduction to the survey about the virtual museums. In second section the emerging tools and formats that are used by the virtual museums are presented. Then, the benefits, which arise from the use of virtual museums, for various groups of end-users are highlighted. Finally, in the last section there are the conclusions of the paper and some future trends. 2 Emerging tools and technologies used by virtual museums Museum curators use new technologies for digitizing the exhibitions’ artifacts information, as well as for spreading and displaying the cultural information to the wide public in an appealing, innovative and cost- effective way. Technological advances and tools that have emerged as areas of extreme interest make it possible to provide customized interfaces for the generation of virtual museums and to design a virtual museum exhibition in a number of ways. New types of interfaces, interaction techniques and devices are developing at a rapid pace and offer many advantages over traditional windows style interfaces. For example, many interaction devices are now available that can be integrated into multi-modal Virtual and Augmented Reality interactive interfaces. Virtual museum exhibitions can present the digitized information about cultural objects, either in a museum environment (e.g. in interactive kiosks), or over the World Wide Web. The first studies in the area were mainly focused on static presentations of texts and photos concerning a museum that offered their information through web sites with a catalogue of 1