With the help of Second Life, the Smithsonian Latino Center has put its diverse collections in cyberspace
While many education organizations would love to have their own museums, it can be costly to own a building large enough to display their exhibits. The Smithsonian Latino Center has solved this problem by taking its museum online.
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.
Liu says that what makes the museum important from an educational standpoint is that it gives students who live far away from museums access to collections that they would otherwise have had to travel long distances to reach. And because the museum is open 24 hours a day, there are no time limits for students who want to explore certain exhibits in depth.
“The students can do a virtual field trip there they can spend as much time as they want looking at a particular exhibit,” he says. “And they can always come back at any time look at other things.”
Carrillo says that several educators have already emailed the Smithsonian Latino Center and asked about forming partnerships, either in helping to design curriculum for the current museum or for getting advice on how to build virtual museums for their own programs.
“I think this is a wonderful turning point in terms of how we think about immersive learning and how we think museums can lead the way in using participatory 3D virtual environments,” she says. “Not to take anything away from scholarship but this is a new frontier for education… For our institution it’s become groundbreaking.”
Looking toward the future, Carrillo says that Second Life technology will have a vital role to play in both the realm of education and the realm of research. This fall, the Latino Center will be test-running its virtual museum in the classroom setting by running a pilot program to educate students at the SEED School of Maryland. Further down the line, she thinks that Second Life can be used as a prototype for long-distance learning where students can learn through fully interactive virtual classrooms.
“For us this museum has been one way to promote new ways of collaborating,” she says. “The next step will be getting educators to work with us in creating these experiences.”
