Art History Museum - Walkable 3D galleries from Wikipedia
Show HN: A walkable 3D art history museum built from Wikipedia
Art History Museum transforms Wikipedia's vast art collection into an immersive 3D experience. Explore every artist and artwork under one roof, from Chinese Painting to Contemporary Pop Art. Zoom into a period, choose an artist, and step inside a virtual gallery to walk among their works. Built with open-source code, it makes art history accessible and engaging for everyone. Free knowledge keeps democracies strong.
Every artist, every work, under one roof.
- crazygringo
This is incredibly cool. It's been a while since I felt this inspired by something on HN. Congratulations on the idea and the implementation!
I genuinely think there's an opportunity for someone (yourself, or someone else) to turn this into a genuinely social experience, a modern museum platform.
I'd love to see people's avatars walking around in some suitably tasteful way, with general info on location/age/sex/occupation. Be able to indicate if you're open to chatting.
Work with actual art historians to give prerecorded virtual tours that start every hour or something, so you can be part of a group following around.
There's something special about the museum experience, and the idea of virtualizing it in a way that makes it accessible to everyone, just through your browser rather than VR goggles, feels somehow a little bit magic.
Let people curate their own wing layouts and architecture and own art selection and where each painting gets hung. Have leaderboards of the most popular ones, and each wing can build doors that transition to other selected wings.
I genuinely think something like this could become "the" virtual museum, the same way Wikipedia is "the" electronic encyclopedia. It's just such a fundamentally different experience from how you currently browse museum's collections electronically.
- Sophira
This looks incredibly cool!
But I do note that it's pulling the images from Wikipedia's servers directly. That feels like it could be pretty bad for Wikipedia's bandwidth. I think I'd feel more comfortable if the art was cached by artfrompixels.com itself, where licensing allows. (And I imagine that for a lot of it there'll be no issue.)
- alexpatin
This is super cool and I look forward to sharing with my art friends. One piece of unsolicited feedback: it is really nice to focus on a particular image in the gallery, but when I'm done, it puts me back in normal cursor mode and I have to click to 'step inside' again. Minor annoyance. Otherwise really neat.
- ggerules
This is an awesome project. It could bring the art museum experience to those that can't travel to museums.
But it is missing so many artists and art movements. A better choice of source material and way more artists can be found on wikiart.org [0]. Maybe the creator could merge scraping efforts?
[0] wikiart.org.
- criddell
At some museums you can hire an art history expert as a guide. In addition to learning the basics (era, artist, etc...) you also find out what's important about any particular piece. They tell you what came before or after the painting or sculpture. You find out who was working with whom. Does the piece have an interesting backstory? Questionable provenance? What was the cultural or political environment at the time?
This does have a little blurb as you enter different galleries, but it's pretty broad. It would be neat to have more details per work.
I really wish I had taken an art history course when I was in school...