Show HN: A walkable 3D art history museum built from Wikipedia

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.

This looks incredibly cool!

But I do note that it's pulling the images from Wikipedia's servers directly. That feels like it could be pretty bad for Wikipedia's bandwidth. I think I'd feel more comfortable if the art was cached by artfrompixels.com itself, where licensing allows. (And I imagine that for a lot of it there'll be no issue.)

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.

Very clean and elegant! A very pleasant experience to walk in!

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.

Did you find any issues with performance in such a large dataset (like "all artists") with such dynamic rendering (specifically for the timeline view)?

Does this use a library for plotting everything on the timeline or is it coded from scratch?

EDIT: I see now the code is at https://github.com/justdataplease/art-history-museum

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.

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...

Great project! Any plans to support VR?

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, but I can't seem to jump up onto the benches, even with crouch jumping.

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..

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.

This is very well done! Thank you. Spent a surprising amount of time looking at paintings. VR would be awesome.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is very, very well done. Thank you.

I was really surprised by this. Well done.

Terrific

This is how I'd like to consume all my information

I remember that art galleries used to be the best thing in Second Life.

Seeing things in a walkable space was incredibly different than browsing a website. There is something quite palpable about it.

I think Google Arts Project would let you navigate real rooms in museums and zoom in on the painting.

I kind of dislike that this website only allows you to browse one artist at a time, and then you have to back to the timeline. It would be a lot better if it was a fully walkable museum.

Just my opinion.

VERY impressed by the implementation, idea, and interface. Major kudos.

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.

nice! if you add also an audioguide it will complete the experience!

great experience! really good work

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.

lovely! thank you

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