Author: Efstratios Geronikolakis

A couple of years before a fire devastated the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro in September, Google’s Arts and Culture team started working with the museum to digitize the collection. Just a few months after the inferno, Google has reopened the museum’s doors — albeit in a virtual form using Street View imagery and digital exhibits. The museum and Google were already planning to make the collection available to view online before the incident. Of course, no virtual tour could ever truly replace a physical museum, nor the estimated 20 million artifacts that the blaze destroyed....

Virtual reality (VR) is now being put to use in myriad ways to help promote travel, and one novel approach that the European Travel Commission has adopted is a VR B2B travel conference—the first-ever EU-China Virtual Travel Fair on Cultural Tourism. The event will officially run from November 27 to 28, although the conference “space” will be virtual and indefinitely browse-able online. In fact, you can already register and view it ahead of the launch via browsers or VR headsets. The platform is a digital recreation of a standard travel fair where destination marketing organizations (DMOs), tour operators, airlines,...

There is a story that is familiar to almost every resident in Chadayamangalam village in Kollam district, Kerala. Legend has it that it was on a rocky peak near the village that the mythological giant eagle of the Ramayana fell while fighting Ravana. Thereafter, the place came to be known as ‘Jatayumangalam’. Over the years, it became Chadayamangalam and the peak became Jatayupara (Jatayu rock).   Sculptor/filmmaker Rajiv Anchal heard the story over a thousand times. “It is a powerful story with a fascinating character and has driven my imagination all these years,” says the master sculptor, who spent...

The David Bowie museum exhibition “David Bowie Is” will be released as an augmented reality mobile app for iOS and Android devices January 8th, 2019 – what would have been the late musician’s 72nd birthday. The app will allow fans to explore the hundreds of costumes, videos, handwritten lyrics and original artwork featured in the exhibit. It will also include dozens of items not featured in the original exhibit, including some that will be exclusive to the app. The augmented reality version of the exhibit is the reportedly the first of its kind. Users will be able to examine...

Amid the opulent and historic confines of Paris, Microsoft is now hosting an exhibit at a local museum that brings a historic map of a Normandy tourist destination to life in augmented reality. The Musée des Plans-Reliefs, a museum dedicated to 3D military maps dating back to the time of Napoleon and Louis XIV, has begun using the HoloLens to enhance a scale model of Mont-Saint-Michel, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for its breathtaking medieval monastery perched atop the island’s mountain. The museum considers the model, created in the 17th century, to be one of its most prized...