VirMuF – Virtual Museum Framework for exhibiting digitized collections

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Back in 2015, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) Virtual Antiquities Museum application, which consists more than 700 pieces found inside BA’s own Antiquities Museum, was a great success and was very positively received by the cultural heritage community in Egypt and the region. As a consequence to that success, various institutions approached the BA seeking to construct other virtual museums of their own. To that end, the BA launched the Virtual Museum Framework (VirMuF).

VirMuF is a set of tools that can be used by non-developers to effortlessly create and publish 3D virtual museums in a very short time. The application allows museums that digitize their collections to publish 3D virtual museums and exhibit these collections without the need for software developers to do the job. VirMuF is user-friendly and requires only a few clicks to create a feature-rich virtual museum. The required training can take up to two days. VirMuF allows organizations and institutions, even those with the tightest budgets, to exhibit their digitized collections through web, desktop, and mobile platforms, quickly and effectively. VirMuF is open-source; hence, teams that include software developers can further extend VirMuF to fit their needs.

A virtual museum should complement the real one by giving users the ability to do things they cannot do in real museums, such as freely manipulating objects or measuring them. Also, the virtual museum should act as a medium for interactive story-telling, to provide more interesting ways of introducing history and archaeology.

VirMuF has been released to the VI-SEEM Virtual Research Environment (VRE) and was presented at the e-Infrastructures for Excellent Science in Southeast Europe and Eastern Mediterranean international conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, May 2018.

To learn about the application and how it works, please watch:

https://youtu.be/9kwM4MZ1qic

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