This is incredibly cool. It's been a while since I felt this inspired by something on HN. Congratulations on the idea and the implementation!
I genuinely think there's an opportunity for someone (yourself, or someone else) to turn this into a genuinely social experience, a modern museum platform.
I'd love to see people's avatars walking around in some suitably tasteful way, with general info on location/age/sex/occupation. Be able to indicate if you're open to chatting.
Work with actual art historians to give prerecorded virtual tours that start every hour or something, so you can be part of a group following around.
There's something special about the museum experience, and the idea of virtualizing it in a way that makes it accessible to everyone, just through your browser rather than VR goggles, feels somehow a little bit magic.
Let people curate their own wing layouts and architecture and own art selection and where each painting gets hung. Have leaderboards of the most popular ones, and each wing can build doors that transition to other selected wings.
I genuinely think something like this could become "the" virtual museum, the same way Wikipedia is "the" electronic encyclopedia. It's just such a fundamentally different experience from how you currently browse museum's collections electronically.
At some museums you can hire an art history expert as a guide. In addition to learning the basics (era, artist, etc...) you also find out what's important about any particular piece. They tell you what came before or after the painting or sculpture. You find out who was working with whom. Does the piece have an interesting backstory? Questionable provenance? What was the cultural or political environment at the time?
This does have a little blurb as you enter different galleries, but it's pretty broad. It would be neat to have more details per work.
I really wish I had taken an art history course when I was in school...
This is super cool and I look forward to sharing with my art friends. One piece of unsolicited feedback: it is really nice to focus on a particular image in the gallery, but when I'm done, it puts me back in normal cursor mode and I have to click to 'step inside' again. Minor annoyance. Otherwise really neat.
This is an awesome project. It could bring the art museum experience to those that can't travel to museums.
But it is missing so many artists and art movements. A better choice of source material and way more artists can be found on wikiart.org [0]. Maybe the creator could merge scraping efforts?
Nice, works surprisingly well on mobile (iOS Firefox). It’s be nice if the UI was a little less intrusive, I have a smaller phone and it takes up a lot of the screen. Maybe just a toggle for UI visibility?
What is strange is that last year I spent a lot of time creating the exact same 3D gallery experience with Claude. I picked up the style of the lights, the benches, the walls, the cards position. I also added music, lights on top of the images and the exact tour experience.
A year later, I see a very similar implementation!...I find that very odd.
But I do like the experience and site, there are few things I can pick from it myself for the project I've.
But it seems to me anything you use Claude for will be used aggressively to train the next model and some else in same prompting space can recreate it.
Not take the anything from the author's work, mine was in a slightly different context.
Indeed i have seen the concept on youtube back in the days. Also what you saying I agree too, about big LLMs that are trained on others people work (i.e. math). it started as single prompt so the model did its own work with a hight probability of using others people work, after that i worked a lot on this. In the future I am sure that i will use my work too.
Nevertheless, I have gathered many ideas from the comments. if you are interested we can cooperate on the project. its a project out of pure interest exporing on more ways to ingest/spread knowledge.
Not ATM ! Thinking of curating more the content and also add an audioguide about the life of each painter as well as some details when you come close to famous paintings. But a nice idea, but it would need better resolution of the paintings (not possible atm since are from wikipedia).
1) Please add a walk speed setting. The current setting feels too fast for a museum environment. The joy of seeing a piece out of the corner of your eye and delayed satisfaction of making your way over to it in a real museum could be captured.
2) Instead of a long endless hallway, please ask it study the layout of museums and implement some of the features. Getting "lost" in a museum is one of the great joys. You end up in a wing that you may otherwise have never been interested in.
Very cool! What stood out is there seems to be a canvas pattern added to the images, which the original don't have. I get it adds a nice touch of lighting but I'd prefer to switch that off to see the image without modifications. Great work!
Very cool, would love to experience (ultra) high resolution presentations of the art. I was the kid that always got scolded by putting my nose up to the cavas to see the brush strokes..
It would be great to add curated exhibitions alongside the single-artist retrospectives: rooms mixing works by several artists, the way a museum curator would assemble a show.
hehe i know right, i was waiting for this! this is supposed to be for educational purposes, but since you want a bit of fun to press P on your keyboard and for password do Vandalism0
feels like with all these edutainment demos that AI is enabling that i'm back playing with Encarta as a kid. Good work.
It's a shame that the real-world-metaphor computer stuff fell out of favor. microsoft bob, etc. It's not that efficient but it's so well self-explained ; to see more art you walk around a museum; who'da thought.
And it's heartbreaking to see the low resolution. I hope the author will explore the large catalogs of high resolution public domain/CC0 images available.
Because the core implementation is really, really nice. I just want to look much more closely.
Paris Musées, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum are some sources I can think of - there are more, I'm sure.
And I _wish_ the super-high rez ones at https://artsandculture.google.com/ would fall on that list too, but I guess that's not the case.
I agree! thinking of going beyond art to include national history. Being Greek, I plan to try Greek history next. Again a museum with paintings sculptures docuemntaty videos transcripts etc.
every artist every work under one roof! audioguide regarding their life and some specific details when come close to a famous painting, indeed sounds nice.
nice maybe rooms designed not just from a generic historical period but themed from the painters specific life moments / or specific era? will work on that, thank you
This is incredibly cool. It's been a while since I felt this inspired by something on HN. Congratulations on the idea and the implementation!
I genuinely think there's an opportunity for someone (yourself, or someone else) to turn this into a genuinely social experience, a modern museum platform.
I'd love to see people's avatars walking around in some suitably tasteful way, with general info on location/age/sex/occupation. Be able to indicate if you're open to chatting.
Work with actual art historians to give prerecorded virtual tours that start every hour or something, so you can be part of a group following around.
There's something special about the museum experience, and the idea of virtualizing it in a way that makes it accessible to everyone, just through your browser rather than VR goggles, feels somehow a little bit magic.
Let people curate their own wing layouts and architecture and own art selection and where each painting gets hung. Have leaderboards of the most popular ones, and each wing can build doors that transition to other selected wings.
I genuinely think something like this could become "the" virtual museum, the same way Wikipedia is "the" electronic encyclopedia. It's just such a fundamentally different experience from how you currently browse museum's collections electronically.
It's so genuinely load-bearing it hurts. And thats where it shapes the paradigm in a very real way.
At some museums you can hire an art history expert as a guide. In addition to learning the basics (era, artist, etc...) you also find out what's important about any particular piece. They tell you what came before or after the painting or sculpture. You find out who was working with whom. Does the piece have an interesting backstory? Questionable provenance? What was the cultural or political environment at the time?
This does have a little blurb as you enter different galleries, but it's pretty broad. It would be neat to have more details per work.
I really wish I had taken an art history course when I was in school...
This is super cool and I look forward to sharing with my art friends. One piece of unsolicited feedback: it is really nice to focus on a particular image in the gallery, but when I'm done, it puts me back in normal cursor mode and I have to click to 'step inside' again. Minor annoyance. Otherwise really neat.
This is an awesome project. It could bring the art museum experience to those that can't travel to museums.
But it is missing so many artists and art movements. A better choice of source material and way more artists can be found on wikiart.org [0]. Maybe the creator could merge scraping efforts?
[0] wikiart.org.
wow i want not aware wikiart.org. indeed a better source ! since i have the infra i will include that too!! thank you a lot!!!
Nice, works surprisingly well on mobile (iOS Firefox). It’s be nice if the UI was a little less intrusive, I have a smaller phone and it takes up a lot of the screen. Maybe just a toggle for UI visibility?
What is strange is that last year I spent a lot of time creating the exact same 3D gallery experience with Claude. I picked up the style of the lights, the benches, the walls, the cards position. I also added music, lights on top of the images and the exact tour experience.
A year later, I see a very similar implementation!...I find that very odd.
But I do like the experience and site, there are few things I can pick from it myself for the project I've.
But it seems to me anything you use Claude for will be used aggressively to train the next model and some else in same prompting space can recreate it.
Not take the anything from the author's work, mine was in a slightly different context.
Indeed i have seen the concept on youtube back in the days. Also what you saying I agree too, about big LLMs that are trained on others people work (i.e. math). it started as single prompt so the model did its own work with a hight probability of using others people work, after that i worked a lot on this. In the future I am sure that i will use my work too.
Nevertheless, I have gathered many ideas from the comments. if you are interested we can cooperate on the project. its a project out of pure interest exporing on more ways to ingest/spread knowledge.
I mean, i think the more likely explanation is that claude created both, and you are overestimating how unique the prompts you gave claude were.
Great project! Any plans to support VR?
Not ATM ! Thinking of curating more the content and also add an audioguide about the life of each painter as well as some details when you come close to famous paintings. But a nice idea, but it would need better resolution of the paintings (not possible atm since are from wikipedia).
So cool and inspiring.
1) Please add a walk speed setting. The current setting feels too fast for a museum environment. The joy of seeing a piece out of the corner of your eye and delayed satisfaction of making your way over to it in a real museum could be captured.
2) Instead of a long endless hallway, please ask it study the layout of museums and implement some of the features. Getting "lost" in a museum is one of the great joys. You end up in a wing that you may otherwise have never been interested in.
Very cool! What stood out is there seems to be a canvas pattern added to the images, which the original don't have. I get it adds a nice touch of lighting but I'd prefer to switch that off to see the image without modifications. Great work!
Agree on the museum sources, and the bit worth adding is most of them serve IIIF so you can pull deep zoom tiles instead of one huge texture.
IIIF i did not know very interesting. will look into it!!! ty
Very cool, would love to experience (ultra) high resolution presentations of the art. I was the kid that always got scolded by putting my nose up to the cavas to see the brush strokes..
Easily done if you leverage https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/... - sure there are loads more museums that offer such a service now too.
yes!!! interesting atm the media is sourced directly from wikipedia. will look into it!
IIIF is your friend here. Many museums / art galleries publish their manifests - example, Science Museum London → https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co6997/...
It would be great to add curated exhibitions alongside the single-artist retrospectives: rooms mixing works by several artists, the way a museum curator would assemble a show.
really nice idea working on this next. Thank you!!
Very cool, but I can't seem to jump up onto the benches, even with crouch jumping.
hehe i know right, i was waiting for this! this is supposed to be for educational purposes, but since you want a bit of fun to press P on your keyboard and for password do Vandalism0
This is very well done! Thank you. Spent a surprising amount of time looking at paintings. VR would be awesome.
Glorious. I've been waiting for this a long time.
Really well executed! Would love a (fuzzy) search to look for certain artists, additional filters, such as by-continent, by-country, etc.
There is Explore button where you can search but noted about more filters i will enchance it!
feels like with all these edutainment demos that AI is enabling that i'm back playing with Encarta as a kid. Good work.
It's a shame that the real-world-metaphor computer stuff fell out of favor. microsoft bob, etc. It's not that efficient but it's so well self-explained ; to see more art you walk around a museum; who'da thought.
This is very, very well done. Thank you.
ty!
It's amazing.
And it's heartbreaking to see the low resolution. I hope the author will explore the large catalogs of high resolution public domain/CC0 images available.
Because the core implementation is really, really nice. I just want to look much more closely.
Paris Musées, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum are some sources I can think of - there are more, I'm sure.
And I _wish_ the super-high rez ones at https://artsandculture.google.com/ would fall on that list too, but I guess that's not the case.
I was really surprised by this. Well done.
Terrific
This is how I'd like to consume all my information
I agree! thinking of going beyond art to include national history. Being Greek, I plan to try Greek history next. Again a museum with paintings sculptures docuemntaty videos transcripts etc.
nice! if you add also an audioguide it will complete the experience!
every artist every work under one roof! audioguide regarding their life and some specific details when come close to a famous painting, indeed sounds nice.
noted!
great experience! really good work
ty
lovely! thank you
beauty
I would like a more curated version of this or a more 'hard room setup' because brains can remember things better with more context.
Going up to the xy ara or through a japanese space helps.
Nonetheless, nice expeirment.
nice maybe rooms designed not just from a generic historical period but themed from the painters specific life moments / or specific era? will work on that, thank you
Uh the history / growth of an artist, love it :)