The Herbert Virtual Museum

In recent years, virtual reality and augmented reality have emerged as areas of extreme interest as unique methods for visualising and interacting with digital museum artefacts in a different context, for example, as a virtual museum or exhibition, particularly over the Internet. Modern cultural heritage exhibitions have evolved from static to dynamic exhibitions and challenging explorations. This paper presents two different applications developed for the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery that make the user’s experience more immersive, engaging, and interactive. The first application utilizes mobile phone devices in order to enrich the visitors experience in the museum, and the second application is a serious game for cultural heritage and in particular for museum environments focusing on the younger visitors. 1. Introduction Learning institutions such as archives, libraries, and museums are playing a pivotal role in the preservation and distribution of cultural knowledge in our society. In order to ensure our cultural heritage is preserved in an accessible form, such institutions need to embrace new technologies for digital acquisition, content management (including cataloguing), and subsequent exhibition to the public and interaction with this digital heritage by the public. In recent years, 3D and virtual reality have emerged as areas of extreme interest as methods for visualizing a museum’s digital artifacts in different context, and particularly over the Internet [1, 2]. This has led to more immersive, engaging, and interactive exhibits and experiences. Virtual museums are valuable to the end-user for efficient and remote learning about their local heritage in a diverse multimodal manner [3] allowing them to interact through many senses to the knowledge representations and artifacts. In this way, museums as a response to changing requirements from users, including pervasive use of mobile devices and the Internet, are changing their way of presenting information about their cultural artifacts to the public. Modern cultural heritage exhibitions have evolved from static exhibitions to dynamic and challenging multimedia explorations. The main factor for this has been the emergence of the world-wide web, which allows museums and other heritage exhibitions to be presented and promoted online. Museum virtual environments can offer much more than static websites, which typically provide little more than a catalogue of pictures and text. Digital artifacts or cultural objects can be presented in a virtual museum and viewed in forms that offer the user multiple