Digital reviews | A geology collection, painting online and an AI library

Virtual visit | Lapworth Museum of Geology, University of Birmingham

The idea of the virtual museum remains unaccountably popular. With a digital budget to invest, many museums seem unable to think outside the box of the gallery, and plump for an immersive reproduction of their physical museum. It’s usually a missed opportunity to reconsider how their collections might work in a digital environment, to both educate and engage.

With that in mind, the University of Birmingham’s virtual encounter with the Lapworth Museum of Geology has at least been done well. The entire environment has been photographed in high resolution, and your journey begins with a drone-style fly-through. A slightly eerie soundtrack gives you a sense of the physical space of the museum, though you meet no fellow guests – the space is yours alone.

Roary, a juvenile allosaurus, presides over the main hall. To escape his bony presence, you can teleport between different points in the exhibition halls using hotspots, then pivot your viewpoint to inspect the displays. Choose an individual display and you get a close-up static view, with pop-outs that reproduce the tombstones and label text.

And it’s here that the limitations of a faithful digital reproduction of a real-life museum become apparent. Rather than rethinking or adapting the content for a user on a laptop or tablet screen, every caption and tombstone label has been photographed and reproduced just as it appears in the physical gallery space. It isn’t easy on the eye, and the arrangement and interpretation of the objects have no virtue other than the fact that this is how they already are in the museum.

Lapworth developed this resource to support national and international teaching with the museum’s collections, but it’s hard to avoid wondering whether, if it had researched the educational needs of visitors and students, this is what it would have come up with as a result.

Online app | Paint’n’Play, National Gallery of Art, Washington, US

Washington’s National Gallery of Art takes the museum drawing app up a notch with Paint’n’Play. It takes half-a-dozen paintings from the collection as a starting point and allows you to play with the colour palette and brushstrokes of each.

Users can mix and match Constable’s earthy oils, Van Gogh’s violet swirls or Sam Gilliam’s rosy splats and create their very own minor masterpiece.

Unsurprisingly, the layout gets a little cramped on a phone and tablet, making it hard to use. This feels like a missed opportunity to keep the kids (or yourself) busy with something just a touch more educational than the latest TikToks.

AI | Playbury

There was a lot of buzz on certain museum newsletters about this app from Singapore’s National Library Board as I was compiling this issue’s reviews.

Allowing even for the usual hype around anything related to AI, it is an intriguing idea. Using the generative language tool ChatGPT, Playbrary turns classic books into choose-your-own-adventures, allowing you to interactively explore fictional worlds.

You can pick from obvious literary candidates, such as Jane Eyre or Frankenstein, but you also have access to hundreds of public domain books. I chose to play Francis Bacon’s 17th-century utopian novel, New Atlantis. The opening passages were rich with accurate detail from the novel, but it didn’t take more than a couple of prompts before the inhabitants of Bacon’s fictional island were showing me how they used ultrasound to break up kidney stones, something that definitely is not in the source material.

This is exactly the kind of hallucination that ChatGPT is famous for, and it rather undermines the point of exploring a real book, the disclaimer about inaccuracies in the beta phase notwithstanding. It’s the type of experiment that museums and libraries perhaps should be doing with AI, but Playbrary could have done with a little more thought before a public launch.