French Style: The Louvre Online Tours

The Louvre is lucky.  It's one of the most well-known and recognized museums in the world, and it's probably never hurting for visitors (or funds).  It holds the world's most famous artwork (the Mona Lisa) and it now has two satellite locations:  one in the north of France and one in Abu Dhabi.  Given all these resources and prestige, you would hope that the museum would have a phenomenal online presence, including some sort of virtual experience.  Once again, the Louvre does not disappoint - at least in quality.

The online tours here represent two galleries:  the Rotunda, which displays the museum building's history, and the Egyptian Antiquities wing.  Launching either of these tours brings you to a digital rendering of each section of the building, which you can move around in by mousing over the floor until black arrows appear or by dragging left or right over the screen.  Descriptions of each room appear in a text box below at the bottom of the screen, and although you get only a short paragraph of details, it's just the right length to inform without overwhelming.

If you browse through the items in the galleries, you'll find that some of them show an "i" when you hover over them.  This indicates that you can click on these items to display a more detailed image and some information.  The images quality is excellent, and I'm glad the museum includes curatorial information (like age, composition and dimensions) for these artifacts, although some descriptive text would be appealing to casual visitors.

These two tours are excellent and make good use of technology and the Louvre's resources, so it's puzzling that more isn't on offer.  There are ten other sections of the museum that could also be made into virtual tours.  I'm also not sure why a third tour, of the Galerie d'Apollon, was displayed on the Louvre's website but was not working (the link took me to Google's French website).

These, I suppose, are goals to reach towards - perhaps more tours are being planned for the future.  Given the Louvre's status in the museum world, they have shown an admirable effort to make at least some of their collections available to the wider world.  I hope they can fix some of the flaws in these tours, and I hope someday to be able to experience more of the museum from the comfort of my computer screen.


The Louvre Online Tours
Website:  www.louvre.fr/en/visites-en-ligne