Inside the Smithsonian Institution's first "virtual museum"

With the help of Second Life, the Smithsonian Latino Center has put its diverse collections in cyberspace

Many education organizations would love to have their own museums. Of course, the big reason that a lot of them don’t is because it costs a lot of money to own a building large enough to display their exhibits.

The Smithsonian Latino Center, a branch of the Smithsonian educational and research institution, has solved this problem by taking its museum online with the help of Ohio University’s Virtual Immersive Technologies and Arts for Learning (VITAL)Lab. The new Latino Virtual Museum which can be accessed through virtual reality platform Second Life, consists of hundreds of different exhibits that have been scanned in as three-dimensional digital replicas for users to explore. Types of exhibits include galleries of Latino paintings, video clips detailing Latino history, a room filled with virtual Caribbean instruments and even a disco club where users’ avatars can learn to dance to meringue music.

Mellissa Carrillo, the creative director for the Latino Virtual Museum, says that she has spent the past five years researching how virtual worlds such as Second Life are constructed and has been looking into what benefits they could provide to educators. She says that having an online hub for the Smithsonian’s Latino collections was important because the collections currently are spread out through several different museums throughout the country.

“It’s important for us to build an online presence because we’re not a museum,” she explains. “Our chief objective is promoting accessibility to Latino collections.”

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Many education organizations would love to have their own museums. Of course, the big reason that a lot of them don’t is because it costs a lot of money to own a building large enough to display their exhibits.

The Smithsonian Latino Center, a branch of the Smithsonian educational and research institution, has solved this problem by taking its museum online with the help of Ohio University’s Virtual Immersive Technologies and Arts for Learning (VITAL)Lab. The new Latino Virtual Museum which can be accessed through virtual reality platform Second Life, consists of hundreds of different exhibits that have been scanned in as three-dimensional digital replicas for users to explore. Types of exhibits include galleries of Latino paintings, video clips detailing Latino history, a room filled with virtual Caribbean instruments and even a disco club where users’ avatars can learn to dance to meringue music.

Mellissa Carrillo, the creative director for the Latino Virtual Museum, says that she has spent the past five years researching how virtual worlds such as Second Life are constructed and has been looking into what benefits they could provide to educators. She says that having an online hub for the Smithsonian’s Latino collections was important because the collections currently are spread out through several different museums throughout the country.

“It’s important for us to build an online presence because we’re not a museum,” she explains. “Our chief objective is promoting accessibility to Latino collections.”

To access the museum, users need only to open an account with Second Life and designed their own personal avatar to navigate through virtual worlds. The museum currently consists of a welcome lobby and two wings, and the Latino Center has plans to build at least 14 other virtual wings in the future for “showcasing different facets of Latino art, music, science and history.”

With such an expansive number of exhibits, it’s not hard to imagine a user feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things to explore within the museum. Dr. Chang Liu, the director of Ohio University’s VITAL Lab, says that as the museum expands, it will be essential to build search capabilities into the virtual museum’s architecture that would allow users to zero in on exhibits they want to see.

“In the future we can create a customized experience for each individual,” he says. “The analogy I would use is if you’re searching for a phone number in the Yellow Pages, there’s a limit on how much information can be stored in a single phone book. But once you turn to Google, there’s really no limit on what you can find and you can search to get hits that are personalized to you.”

Liu says that it took his lab about a year to construct the virtual museum’s welcome lobby and two opening wings. However, he notes that additional museum wings will not take nearly as long to build since much of the construction over the past year involved experimenting with different formats. The museum’s current incarnation requires about three servers to maintain, he says.