Show HN: A guided 3D Leonardo da Vinci museum, built in code

Show HN: A guided 3D Leonardo da Vinci museum, built in code(museumofages.org)

52 points by micstradev 5 hours ago | 21 comments

Hello HN,

I am the founder of a small nonprofit which built Museum of Ages. We opened its first wing last week, a digital Leonardo da Vinci museum. It is a virtual tour with 17 stops, his works and then his last house in Amboise. The entrance is free.

At the different stops you can see for example his paintings close to their real size, or 15 of his machines rebuilt in code, and you can have a look at 29 of his anatomy sheets. We also selected 207 of his manuscript pages which you can read in a virtual reading table, mirror the view to read his writing and 131 of the 207 are translated. We also rebuilt his last house in Amboise on the later stops of the walk. The museum is available in seven languages.

Each stop has one of four grades as a label, documented, reconstructed, conjectural and not known. In a detailed view the user can have a closer look at the sources.

The materials of the rooms and machines are created in Three.js. The museum runs with WebGPU. If the browser doesn’t support it, the fallback is WebGL2. To create the textures we used Creative Commons Zero photo scans (CC0) and for a few small objects we use free 3D models (CC0).

Our mission is to create digital museums you can walk as not everyone can get to a museum, because illness or disability keeps them away. Some cannot afford the trip or just reside far away. So our goal is also to make our digital museums as accessible as possible. Therefore we also pre-rendered the walk so that it also works on older phones and is easy to use for older people.

We released the code under AGPL-3.0. The texts and pictures are CC BY-SA 4.0. Reproductions have their own licenses. https://github.com/chipmates/museumofages

We put a lot of time and passion into the museum and hope you like it. We are happy about any feedback. Which digital museum would you like to see next?

dmje 13 minutes ago |

I think I’m a little churlish about this whole “skeuomorphic museum exhibition” angle. I’ve worked in and with museum technology for 30 years, and run two businesses working with hundreds of cultural heritage / museum clients.

Although this is technically impressive, I’m just not entirely sure why. Like - I just don’t want to dwell here…

The whole idea that you have to be in some kind of virtual 3D space just seems a little bit 1998 for me. When I worked at the Science Museum in the early 2000’s for example we were thinking about VRML and I was out on gallery shooting 3D pans and knitting them together for the web. Back then it did feel like there was a “if you can’t visit, here’s the next best thing” and that this should be “a virtual reality space online”.

But I think we’ve moved on. Museums have been making online exhibitions that are much more than just “a recreation of the real space online” for 20+ years - many of them are now really good at this. Take a look at someone like the Wellcome Collection [0] stories for example. They’re using the medium really well, they’re writing brilliantly, they’re knitting together fascinating relationships between items. The editorial is brilliant. The insights are brilliant. The linkages are brilliant. And as a consequence of all this, you end up wanting to stay.

Not to knock the OP, it’s nice - I like it, it’s slick, it’s well done, and anyone who gets anything out the door deserves a pat on the back - but I’m not sure it works as an engaging mechanism. Not for me, anyway.

[0] https://wellcomecollection.org/stories

boriskourt 2 minutes ago | |

Exactly this, it’s something that keeps being thrown around for new project ideas in cultural heritage for decades. And there is a metric ton of prior art. But there is no clear value proposition, and if for some reason someone pushes it through it sits unused for a few months or years and gets sunset after someone forgets it exists.

Great tech demo. These projects need demand and drive from the public, and there isn’t any. It’s also missing the deeper motivations of why people visit museums and cultural institutions.

LewisOrton 25 minutes ago |

There is plenty of space for improvement like others have said here and i think it just needs a bit more time.

llms are great at languages but you dont just ask it to "translate from english to other supported languagues" it generates things that are hard to understand. when we talk about translation in real world we're actually talking about is a fundamental re-intepretation(transcreation) of the source text through target language's local, native mindset, and you should do the same with llms.

tiborsaas 49 minutes ago |

I don't understand why I can't just walk around the museum and discover things for myself.

I can't even navigate to the devices and inventions section with a single click on the listing page. The 3D scene is really well done, it would be nice if you just let people walk around freely instead of animating the camera.

And I also think you shouldn't automatically display the image in 2D, breaks my immersion immediately.

micstradev 37 minutes ago | |

Thanks for the feedback. The walk is guided on purpose and pre-rendered as a film. Therefore everyone gets the same detail, also on an older phone, and people who are not so technical can’t get lost. Half of our visitors came on a phone. You can jump straight to the machines from the Plan in the Instruments panel, but it is a bit hidden, we will fix that. The flat view is on purpose too, there you see each work sharp and in its true colours.

Kim_Bruning 1 hour ago |

The UI design might need some work.

It starts with no controls, just a picture. I hit esc. Things start moving. It keeps moving, I keep hitting esc, it doesn't stop. I try ctrl-c , no dice. I look around the frame for buttons. I try one of the buttons, it moves faster. I hold down esc. It doesn't respond to holding down esc either . I see no way to gain control. At no point do I gain control.

Ultimately it stops. Fine. Ok, no response to WASD. No response to drag motion. I click "Instruments" , I get a side-bar "instruments of the museum" with no contents. I click in the side bar. Now I can't close it, and other controls are gone. I try hitting esc. Multiple random clicks later i'm back where I started.

I try the "more" button", I am now looking at a painting sideways, and an anodyne text which explains very little. I click on a painting. Things start moving. I hit Esc. Suddenly the painting is full screen. GREAT. Ok, and now how do I get out? Esc? Oh esc. Ok NOW ESC... oh no, things are moving again. I didn't mean for things to move. Esc shouldn't cause things to START moving. hit esc again. The esc is ignored.

I end up at another painting. I try some buttons. Most don't work. I hit esc again. Things start moving. I didn't mean to move away from the painting, I just had it in front of me!

I am very confused.

I'm not in control here.

edit: "Esc shouldn't cause things to START moving"

micstradev 1 hour ago | |

Thank you for the detailed feedback. You are right, there should be a way to stop the walk while it moves. We will add that. ESC to close is however intended. The Instruments panel closes with the button at its bottom, but more intuitive would be at the top and we will move it there. The walk is guided on purpose, so WASD and dragging don’t work, but we should say that.

frakt0x90 59 minutes ago | | |

For the record I did not have any of the issues of the above person. I did try to click off the initial image but when I couldn't, I saw the big yellow button which I pressed and realized it was on rails and everything went smoothly from there.

virtualritz 2 hours ago |

The setup misses everything that you could do to let me experience his work in a setting reflecting his time.

An Italian Renaissance palazzo, the house of a nobleman of that time, maybe Leonardo's re-imagined studio etc.

Instead I see a museum that one of my architect friends might get excited (or offended) about but which completely removes all context from the works that the format you choose would otherwise naturally enable.

On that note: getting the colors of the paintings right is also tricky.

When you source these paintings you need to feed their color to a linearization process (as they likely will be in some non-linear color space like sRGB) before applying any scene lighting. And then finally do the display transform. Otherwise horrible things will happen (do happen in your current setup) to the colors and Leonardo will turn once in his grave every time someone opens the website. ;)

micstradev 1 hour ago | |

Thank you for the feedback. The later stops are his last house in Amboise which we rebuilt. For the earlier stops we decided on a building to serve the walk as well as possible. On colors: we decoded the images from sRGB, but the color filter over the scene and the video change them a bit on the wall. We will look into it. The close view shows them unchanged.

WillAdams 1 hour ago |

c.f.,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester

which really needs to escape off the platter and be more accessible.

micstradev 49 minutes ago | |

Agreed. It is one of the notebooks we could not put on our reading table. We found no copy online that is free to use, so the museum lists it as missing.

sixtyj 4 hours ago |

I went through the first few images. It is really good to see scale placed over the painting.

I don’t like that I cannot move around by myself. Move to another piece is too slow… also entering museum (at first it is nice gimmick, the second entry is annoying as museum doesn’t remember my position; or I haven’t figured it out :)

Cheers.

micstradev 4 hours ago | |

Thanks. Yes, it is not possible to move around freely, that was a compromise we made to keep it accessible for older devices and older people. If you click the arrow it moves faster by the way. In the settings there is also a speed setting. Actually the address keeps your stop and a reload should bring you back to where you were.

mkesper 1 hour ago |

Nice idea! The German translation is quite broken, though (not understandable).

micstradev 1 hour ago | |

Thanks! Which part was hard to read, the walk or the website? We would like to fix it.

auggierose 3 hours ago |

> We rebuild what was. You walk through it.

Closing the page right there.

kjjohnsen 2 hours ago | |

Obviously AI was used to write some of this, but certainly not all of it.

UomoNeroNero 2 hours ago |

I love it. Well done

micstradev 2 hours ago | |

Thank you. We are happy you like it.

z4o1zbxt3 5 hours ago |

its good,