Digitally recreating the experience that people have while visiting a museum of any kind has always been a challange, but with the advances made in domains like photography, information technology and internet broadband, the balance has tarted to change in favour of a new, virtual, digital museum.

The first request of this kind came from the National Village Museum(link) that wanted to create digital representations of the houses and farms they had exposed in the open-air museum.

To come up with a solution we teamed up with a great local photographer and cameraman @RoundImage, and used his skill and knowledge in the photography domain to capture the needed high detail photos.

The raw photos needed processing and stiching in order to create for each panorama an equirectangular projection.

Next using open-source projects like the Microsoft HDView, or other Flash or Silverlight frameworks we take these high resolution 2D representations and wrap them on a sphere, allowing the user to interact and rotate around the center point of that sphere, recreating an experience similar to the actual presence of the user in that room/place.

When using Photosynth to generate these spherical panoramas, the end user also benefits from the Deep Zoom technology, allowing him to zoom-in to view objects close-up and in very high detail.