A New Virtual Museum Equipped with Automatic Video Content Generator

Virtual Museum service has been carried out in many places owing to the advanced video and network technology in recent years. In the virtual museum, people primarily experience the prepared content actively with a mouse, a touch panel and specially designed tangible devices. On the other hand, in a real museum space, people appreciate the artifacts passively walking around the space freely without stress. It can be said that the virtual museum is designed to urge people to deal with it rather actively when compared to the real museum. We have been studying and developing a new type of virtual museum enabling people to participate the space with both active and passive way, by implementing various new functions. In this time, we developed the new virtual museum equipped with a video content generator using the virtual exhibition space modeled with 3D computer graphics (CG). This video content is created in real-time by using the 3DCG-modeled museum space as it is, adding appropriate visual and audio effects such as camerawork, superimposing text, synthesized voice narration, back ground music etc. Since this system is working in the 3DCG space, a user can easily go back and forth between the two modes of watching the video content passively and doing walkthrough in the space actively by a wheel mouse. In this paper, we first introduce primary virtual museums in the world. Then, we describe our method: 1) specially designed walkthrough algorithm, 2) the video content generator using the 3DCG museum space and 3) seamless integration of the 1) and the 2). We then describe our functioning prototype followed by the conclusion and the future plans.