Almost There: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Panoramic Virtual Tour

The Smithsonian museum system is, in my opinion, one of America's national treasures.  Comprising nineteen separate institutions plus a zoo and nine research centers, its collections are magnificent and highly varied.  And because it's run by the federal government, you can visit any part of it for free.  But if you've never made the trek to Washington, DC (or if you went there but somehow managed to not go to any part of the Smithsonian), you might never get a chance to see any of this.  But fear not, because the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) now has a virtual tour you can access from the comfort of your own home.

The NMNH's tour is pretty impressive.  You start in the building's rotunda and are treated to a lifelike 3D panoramic view of what's inside.  From there you can move around to all the exhibits - nineteen in total - via hotspots marked as arrows.  Clicking these arrows will take you from one gallery to the next, and in each section you can zoom in or out, rotate, and move up or down.  Galleries can also be accessed on a map in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, where the hotspots are labeled and clickable.

This setup is fascinating, because it really is the next best thing to actually being there.  The dioramas, the artifacts, the taxidermied animals - each of them is right in front of you in all their magnificence.  At some of the exhibits, you can even click on a camera symbol to get a close-up view of a particular specimen.  And since this is a virtual tour, you can spend as long as you like looking at everything, without the crowds and noise of a real museum.  The NMNH has even put several past exhibits online, plus a few views of the museum's grounds.

The only thing I found frustrating was the lack of interpretation on the tour.  In theory, you could zoom in on any of the information panels in the gallery until they were legible.  But in reality, only about half the panels were photographed in a resolution that allowed you to read them.  And those that are clear enough to make out distinct words can be difficult to view - you have to navigate precisely, so that the text comes into your field of vision, and you can easily bypass them if you don't look hard enough.

It would be nice to have information about what's in the galleries readily available - that would probably make this virtual tour perfect.  But even though that's not currently available, I still have to recommend the NMNH's panoramic tour as one of the best virtual museum projects I've seen.  It's made from pretty advanced technology, but it's not full of bells and whistles and gimmicks that take away from the museum's purpose.  It simply recreates the experience of browsing through the museum and seeing its many wonderful objects.


Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Panoramic Virtual Tour
Website:  www.mnh.si.edu/panoramas