I am the founder of a small nonprofit which built Museum of Ages. We opened its first wing last week, a digital Leonardo da Vinci museum. It is a virtual tour with 17 stops, his works and then his last house in Amboise. The entrance is free.
At the different stops you can see for example his paintings close to their real size, or 15 of his machines rebuilt in code, and you can have a look at 29 of his anatomy sheets. We also selected 207 of his manuscript pages which you can read in a virtual reading table, mirror the view to read his writing and 131 of the 207 are translated. We also rebuilt his last house in Amboise on the later stops of the walk. The museum is available in seven languages.
Each stop has one of four grades as a label, documented, reconstructed, conjectural and not known. In a detailed view the user can have a closer look at the sources.
The materials of the rooms and machines are created in Three.js. The museum runs with WebGPU. If the browser doesn’t support it, the fallback is WebGL2. To create the textures we used Creative Commons Zero photo scans (CC0) and for a few small objects we use free 3D models (CC0).
Our mission is to create digital museums you can walk as not everyone can get to a museum, because illness or disability keeps them away. Some cannot afford the trip or just reside far away. So our goal is also to make our digital museums as accessible as possible. Therefore we also pre-rendered the walk so that it also works on older phones and is easy to use for older people.
We released the code under AGPL-3.0. The texts and pictures are CC BY-SA 4.0. Reproductions have their own licenses. https://github.com/chipmates/museumofages
We put a lot of time and passion into the museum and hope you like it. We are happy about any feedback. Which digital museum would you like to see next?
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