Virtual Exploration: A Student Report on the British Museum Tour

This report presents a student's experience of a virtual tour of the British Museum. The tour encompasses various sections, starting with the African textiles exhibit, detailing the history and cultural significance of the displayed artifacts, including information on masquerade art. The exploration continues to the B1 section, showcasing rock sculptures from ancient sites in Athens. The report then describes the vase-painting techniques, followed by sections dedicated to South Indian art and culture, and Chinese kilns. The student highlights the ease of navigation and the detailed information provided by the virtual tour, emphasizing the museum's vast collection and its accessibility through digital platforms. References to academic papers supporting the report are also included.

Running head: VIRTUAL TOUR OF BRITISH MUSEUM
VIRTUAL TOUR OF BIRTISH MUSEUM
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author note

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The British Museum is situated in the Bloomsbury region of London, United
Kingdom. The museum serves as a public institution and is dedicated to history, culture and
art forms of human civilization. It has a permanent collection of almost eight million works
and is considered to be amidst the largest as well as most comprehensive museums that are in
existence. It owes its source to the British Empire filming the story behind human culture and
civilization from the beginning to the end (Home 2016). It was world’s first public national
museum. The paper will be discussing on the experience of the virtual tour of this great
museum. The virtual tour of the museum is possible with Google Street View and each of the
galleries of the museum can be explored from any place.
This is the first time that I am experiencing a virtual tour of any museum. The inner
architecture of the museum is beautiful. The first section I visited was B2 where I found
informations about African textiles. This provided informations of the history behind the
African textiles. The textiles were displayed in this section for the public to get an idea of the
same. I also came to know about Masquerade which is an art involving transformation. This
occurs at the time of seasonal changes as well as during rites of passage for example initiation
and death (Tavčar, Csaba and Butila 2016). This part of the museum is dedicated to the
cultural life and artefacts of the African people. The next stop was B1 where I found rock
sculptures belonging to famous sites at Athens. It included rock samples from the Mausoleum
at Halicarnassus, Ephesus that is the archaic temple of Artemis, Priene that is the temple of
Athena Polias, Bassae that is the temple of Apollo and many more. Then the next stop was
the sculptors and sculpture of the Mausoleum, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The virtual
tour provides clear and zoomed out view of the informations and users can easily go through
the information. After exiting from the room of sculptors there is the vase-painting section
where the techniques of Greek vase painting have been displayed (Pivec and Kronberger
2016). The next section displayed sculptors such as the Limestone relief panel that depicts a

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chakavartin, limestone pillars illustrating scenes that are related to the life of Buddha. This
section shows the art and culture of early times of South India. The history behind Eastern
India and Hinduism has also been displayed. The section focuses on the art and culture of
India. The next section represents the beautiful Chinese kilns. A computer is there in the
section that allows the tourists visiting to browse almost from millions of objects from the
collection of the Museum including the objects in the specific gallery as well (Abraham
2015). The next section I explored provides information about early dynastic period to middle
kingdom focusing on evolution of coffins and mummies of scared bulls. The next section
provides information about the nation building of modern Japan referring to the year 1853 to
1952. It was a good experience to explore the British Museum and above all exciting to take
the virtual tour.

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References
Abraham, J., 2015. The role of curiosity in making up digital content promoting cultural
heritage. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 184, pp.259-265.
Home, M.W., 2016, April. Virtual reality at the British Museum: What is the value of virtual
reality environments for learning by children and young people, schools, and families.
In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of Museums and the Web, Los Angeles, CA,
USA (pp. 6-9).
Pivec, M. and Kronberger, A., 2016, September. Virtual museum: Playful visitor experience
in the real and virtual world. In 2016 8th International Conference on Games and Virtual
Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-Games) (pp. 1-4). IEEE.
Tavčar, A., Csaba, A. and Butila, E.V., 2016. Recommender system for virtual assistant
supported museum tours. Informatica, 40(3).