Virtual Tours of Museums & Historic Vessels
Expanding Access to Museums & Cultural Heritage
The Hellenic Archaeological Exploration Society works with its industry partner, Ilios Remote Sensing, to create interactive virtual tours for museums, historic vessels, and nonprofit cultural-heritage organizations. These projects are provided in support of HAES's mission to promote education, preservation, outreach, and public engagement through technology. A virtual tour allows people to explore a museum or historic site from virtually anywhere while also giving prospective visitors an opportunity to discover what they can experience in person.
Virtual access does not have to replace visitation. It can encourage it.
More Than a Virtual Walkthrough
Turning the Tour Into an Interactive Exhibit
The greatest value of a museum virtual tour is not simply allowing someone to move through the building. Interactive tags can provide information at the exact location where it becomes relevant. As visitors explore, tags can:
Explain artifacts and exhibits
Display historic photographs
Show additional images that are not physically on display
Present video and other multimedia
Explain machinery or historic equipment
Provide historical context
Link to additional educational resources
Highlight restoration and preservation work
Direct visitors to related collections and exhibits
This transforms the virtual tour from a digital walkthrough into an interactive educational and interpretive experience. Show visitors what's there. Tell them why it matters.
United States Coast Guard Museum Northwest
Explore Maritime History Online
The United States Coast Guard Museum Northwest preserves and presents the history of the United States Coast Guard and its predecessors in the Pacific Northwest. The interactive tour allows remote visitors to explore the museum while tags placed throughout the experience provide additional information about exhibits and artifacts.
Look for the interactive tags as you explore the museum.
Foss Waterway Seaport
Bringing Maritime Heritage Online
Foss Waterway Seaport in Tacoma, Washington preserves and interprets the maritime history of Puget Sound. This interactive tour provides remote access to the museum and demonstrates how a physical collection can also become an online educational resource. The tour is a work in progress, with additional interpretive tags to be incorporated as exhibit information and supporting material become available.
As those tags are developed, visitors will be able to discover additional historical information, photographs, media, and context while exploring the museum virtually.
Historic Tugboat Arthur Foss
Explore a National Historic Landmark
Built in 1889, Arthur Foss is one of the oldest surviving wooden-hulled tugboats in the United States and an important part of Pacific Northwest maritime history. An interactive virtual tour provides access to the vessel while preserving the spatial relationship between its working and living spaces.
Historic vessels present particular accessibility challenges. Steep ladders, narrow passageways, machinery spaces, and confined areas can make portions of a vessel difficult or impossible for some visitors to experience in person.
The virtual tour allows anyone to explore these spaces remotely, while interactive tags can provide historical photographs, explain machinery and vessel systems, identify important features, and tell the stories associated with the vessel.
The result is not simply a tour of a historic vessel. It is an interactive platform for interpreting its history.
Historic Fishing Vessel Tordenskjold
Preserving the Working Maritime Heritage of Puget Sound
Commercial fishing vessels represent an important part of the maritime history and working waterfront of the Pacific Northwest. An interactive virtual tour preserves a digital record of the vessel while allowing visitors to explore spaces that are normally difficult to experience through photographs alone. From the wheelhouse and working deck to machinery and crew spaces, the tour helps preserve not only the appearance of the vessel but also an understanding of how its different spaces relate to one another.
Interactive tags can add information about equipment, fishing operations, vessel history, restoration, and the people who worked aboard her.
Digital documentation helps preserve the story of working vessels as well as the vessels themselves.
Preserving Access Beyond the Exhibit
A Digital Record for the Future
Museum exhibits change. Historic vessels undergo restoration. Buildings are renovated. Objects are moved between exhibits, placed into storage, or temporarily removed from public display. A virtual tour can therefore serve another purpose: documenting how a museum, vessel, or cultural-heritage site existed at a particular moment in time. That record can support education and outreach today while also becoming part of the organization's long-term digital documentation.
Helping Museums Reach More People
Museums and cultural-heritage organizations often have extraordinary collections but limited resources for creating sophisticated digital experiences.
HAES seeks to help bridge that gap by working with technical partners to make modern documentation and visualization technologies available to nonprofit organizations.
These virtual experiences can reach students, researchers, prospective visitors, donors, members, and people who may never otherwise have an opportunity to visit the physical location.
Most importantly, they can help turn online curiosity into real-world engagement.
Explore remotely. Learn something new. Then come see the real thing.
Interested in a Virtual Museum Project?
HAES welcomes opportunities to collaborate with museums, historic vessels, cultural organizations, and nonprofit institutions interested in digital documentation, virtual access, education, and public outreach.
Please contact us.