25 Best & Famous Virtual Museum Tours
Recently updated on June 18th, 2021 at 01:30 am
During our childhood days, whenever we want to visit the museum, we need to physically be there with our teachers or parents. However, with the latest virtual reality technology, we are now able to attend it virtually too. Now, let’s see what is the popular, the best and famous virtual museum tours that we and our kids can try from the comfort of our home and sofa.
What is Virtual Museum Tour?
It is another way to experience the museum without being physically at the location. For this purpose, usually the museums will use approach such as 360-degrees videos or walk-around tour. With this facility, you can have the tour in 360 degrees and some is available in VR format too. Most of the virtual tours are also interactive where they provide the voice over descriptions with slideshows as well.
The List of Famous Virtual Museum Tours…
We try our best to get the list of good museum virtual tours that you can try at home. Some of them claim that they have virtual reality gallery, but in order to try it you need to go there physically first. And from what we found, this is the list that you can try without coming to the museum itself. As much as possible, we will try to provide more variety to the list below…
1) Smithsonian American Art Museum
This very famous museum in America offer the virtual reality tour for us to experience the Renwick Gallery Exhibition. To add, there are nine great contemporary artists that involved in creating it using InstaVR platform. To enjoy the tour, you can try it yourself by downloading the “Wonder 360” app to your mobile phone and use it with the Google Cardboard technology that should be affordable to nearly everybody.
URL: https://americanart.si.edu/wonder360
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2) Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
This museum located in England also offer the looks inside it from remote. The virtual tour consists of four locations is the collaboration between the museum and Scan Tech Digital company. In addition, they are using Matterport platform to deliver it.
URL: https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/bmag/virtual-tour
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3) Franklin Institute in Philadelphia
IMS provided service that offer the 360 degrees view of this popular museum in United States. Beside that, the tour includes the view of different event spaces and come up with the option to open photo galleries or videos of the space. You can watch the tour by using your browser.
URL: http://3hundred60.com/Franklin_Institute_360web.html
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4) Musée du Louvre, Paris
This famous Louvre museum in Paris, France, has the exhibit called “Monalisa: Beyond the Glass“. As most of us already know, Monalisa is a great and most popular painting in the world by Leonardo da Vinci. This exhibit is the collaboration between this museum and also the HTC Vive Arts. In addition, you can download the app from the VIVEPORT website.
URL: https://arts.vive.com/us/articles/projects/art-photography/mona_lisa_beyond_the_glass/
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Furthermore, Louvre is one of the most historic art museums and also the most visited museum in the world. Hence, it is very thankful that they also provide the Louvre virtual tour service for us to visit the museum during this COVID-19 pandemic season. In addition, it offers seven galleries that you can explore via online. One of them sounds interesting to us which is “Founding Myths: From Hercules to Darth Vader“. It looks into how the artists, filmmakers and musicians around the world have drawn inspiration from myths to create their masterpieces.
URL: https://www.louvre.fr/en/visites-en-ligne
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5) Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
This great museum in Washington, D.C, is the most visited natural history museum in the world. It also offers the virtual tour of its museum by using our own web browser. They build it by using the WebVR technology. The good thing is that, you can switch it to the stereoscopic mode so you can enjoy the 360 degrees virtual tour using your Google Cardboard too. The interesting exhibits are like the skeleton of American mastadon, the cool T-Rex and other dinosaurs from the Jurassic age…
URL: https://naturalhistory.si.edu/visit/virtual-tour
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6) Rijksmuseum with Museum VR Tour
This national museum of Netherlands also offer the virtual tour and it seems they take it very serious. With the tagline “From Home: We bring the museum to you“, they also provide some gamification elements in it such as the challenge to find keys, discover hidden words and you can also win prize for it. That’s really awesome initiative.
URL: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/from-home
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7) National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
This famous museum in Korea offers the VR tour with title “How to create a landscape“. It also comes with realistic 3D model of the gallery that you can play around like a doll house. Moreover, if you want to view in in VR mode, they highly recommend using Oculus Quest. But they also support Oculus Go and other headsets that include controllers.
URL: https://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/pr/movDetail.do?mbMovCd=01
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8) The National Gallery, London
The National Gallery in London offers the virtual tours to let you explore their greatest collection of paintings through your VR headset, desktop or smartphone. Moreover, they have the panoramic view of the gallery in 360 degrees by collaborating with Google Street View. And they also have the “Sainsbury Wing VR Tour” where you can experience the collection of over 270 Early Renaissance paintings from year 1200 to 1500. In addition, the gallery and Oculus teamed up using Matterport’s 3D camera technology to produce this virtual tour.
URL: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visiting/virtual-tours
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9) Picasso Museum of Barcelona
This museum offer the 360-degrees tour to its courtyard and you can observe the details of the patios of the museum. Unfortunately, the only downside is that you need to download and enable the Adobe Flash Player first which the product itself is no longer supported by Adobe after 31st December 2020. Hope the museum will upgrade the technology soon.
URL: http://courtyard.museupicassobcn.org/
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10) The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)
This gallery in Melbourne, Australia also provide the virtual tour of their exhibition by using the Matterport’s technology. It is an interactive self-guided tours that you can enjoy from your home. Their recommendation is to use Oculus Quest to fully enjoy it.
URL: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/
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11) Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum
The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum has the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts on exhibit and is located in western North America. It also offers the 360 virtual tour where you can explore the underground tomb and witness the Alchemy Garden.
URL: https://egyptianmuseum.org/360-museum-tour
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12) Nikola Tesla Museum
Nikola Tesla, a great inventor, electrical engineer and mechanical engineer, also got his own museum. It is the only museum that preserve the original and personal legacy of that legendary figure in science world. You can explore the 3D interactive view of Nikola Tesla’s lab on Long Island. Build using Web VR, you can also watch it in the stereoscopic VR mode.
URL: https://nikolateslamuseum.org/en/virtual/longisland/
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13) National Museum United States Air Force
This virtual tour of US Air Force museum has many cool exhibits related with aviation and planes. And it also shows the planes that it used in the World War 2 as well. Because of that, it is a good place to visit for the military or army veterans.
URL: http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/
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14) The Dalà Theatre-Museum
This museum in Spain is dedicated to Salvador DalÃ, who is the famous surrealist artist in the world. You can visit the museum virtually to appreciate his works, sculptures and masterpieces.
URL: https://www.salvador-dali.org/en/museums/dali-theatre-museum-in-figueres/visita-virtual/
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15) The State Hermitage Museum
This museum located in St. Petersburg, Russia, has a vast amount of artwork on display. Furthermore, that includes the work by Rembrandt, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo. Moreover, they take the Hermitage virtual tour very seriously where it covers nearly all part of the museum and it’s very, very comprehensive tour. You can imagine it by looking at the map below and it is just the First Floor! You gonna get shock to see the number of circles in the Second Floor 🙂
URL: https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/panorama/virtual_visit/panoramas-m-1/?lng=en
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16) The Egyptian Museum
This museum in Cairo is the oldest archaeological museum in the Middle East. Furthermore, it has the largest collection of Pharaonic antiquities in the world. Moreover, in one of the Egyptian Museum virtual tours, it gives us opportunity to see the iconic mask of the Golden Pharaoh, Tutankhamun. In addition, the discovery of the Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 was one of the most spectacular moment in the history of archeology.
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17) The Natural Museum History, London
This very famous museum located in London is very popular with the display of a big blue whale skeleton named Hope. Furthermore, the skeleton is so big and estimated to be 82-foot long. The museum also showcases the valuable pieces collected by Charles Darwin as well.
Secondly, with many life and earth science specimens under it roof, no wonder that it is the most visited natural history museum in Europe. Lastly, from the site, it looks like the Natural Museum History virtual tour is leveraging a lot on the Google Arts and Culture platform.
URL: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/virtual-museum.html
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18) Science Museum, London
This museum in London has over 350,000 objects and archives from the collection of its group. The collection come from many areas such as science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Due to its popularity, it is estimated there around five millions visitors each year coming to the museum. Finally, for its virtual tour, the Science Museum leverage on the Google Streetview to deliver it.
URL: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/virtual-tour-science-museum
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19) The Museum of Flight
This museum in Seattle dedicated itself with the history of aircraft. Its virtual tour enable us to see the inside of some of the iconic planes. In addition, you’ll be able to access the cockpits and interiors of the aircraft as well. For those planes that involve in war, you can also observe the gunner position as well.
Moreover, some brand of the aircrafts are like Antonov, Boeing, Concorde and Douglas. There is also the iconic presidential jet plane which is “Air Force One” that is using Boeing VC-137B as well. The museum uses Matterport 3D, 360 Photosphere and also WebGL to deliver the virtual tour to us.
URL: https://museumofflight.org/Explore-The-Museum/Virtual-Museum-Online
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20) The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC)
Located in England, this museum is dedicated to the world of computer or computing technology. It is the home to the largest collection of working historic computers since the 1940s. It is since the era of Turing-Welchman Bombe and Colossus where the size of computer and mainframes during that time was so gigantic. Furthermore, it is estimated there are around 50,000 artefacts in their collection.
URL: https://www.tnmoc.org/3d-virtual-tour
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21) Bank Negara Malaysia
For this banking museum in Malaysia, it dedicated itself on the financial and economic exhibits. It also offers the virtual trip to its museum where you’ll be able to view it in 360 degrees format.
URL: http://www.museum.bnm.gov.my/v2/virtualmuseum/
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22) Museum Nasional Indonesia
This national museum located in Jakarta, Indonesia, houses around 160,000 artifacts and exhibits. You also will be able to experience the virtual tour of the museum in 360 degrees view by using the browser or VR headset as well.
URL: https://www.museumnasional.or.id/virtual-tour
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23) NASA (National Aeronautics & Space Administration)
NASA, the popular and outstanding space agency in the world, also provides the virtual tours to its centers such as Ames Research Center, Armstrong Flight Research Center, Glenn Research Center and many more. Besides the research center, you can also ‘visit’ their other facilities, laboratories and operations control centers too.
URL: NASA at Home – Virtual Tours and Apps
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24) Boston Children’s Museum
Founded in 1913, this museum is the second oldest and one of the largest children’s museum in the world. The exhibits of the museum focus on science, culture, environmental awareness, arts, health and fitness. It is estimated around 50,000 artifacts in the museum’s collection.
URL: https://bostonchildrensmuseum.org/museum-virtual-tour
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25) International Spy Museum
For those that seeks the thrill of spy and espionage world, then this museum might be just suitable for you. Located in Washington DC, the International Spy Museum dedicated itself in the research, exhibitions and educational programming in the world of secret intelligence and espionage. It has the largest collection of international espionage artifacts ever placed on public display.
URL: https://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/virtual-tours/
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26) Bonus: More Famous Museum VR Tour at Google Arts & Culture
According to Google, there are over 2,000 famous museums that you can explore online. You can visit it at https://artsandculture.google.com/partner. That’s really impressive!! We try one of them and able to tour the museum in 360 degrees and also able to zoom in and zoom out.
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To make it more real, you can download the Google Arts & Culture app on Android or iOS and view it using the virtual reality viewer like Google Cardboard. When you are already inside the museum’s page, you need to go down to the “Virtual Tours” section and click on a tour to experience it in VR…
In case if there is any more interesting museum VR tour, we will update the list accordingly. And lastly, for your information, the wonderful image above is by just-pics from Pixabay.
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