Vermont Art Online Creates a Virtual Tour of Museums and Galleries

Louise Jones April 9, 2020

Curators at Middlebury College Museum of Art in Vermont, Sarah Laursen and Sarah Briggs, developed Vermont Art Online with ThingLink when museums, galleries and other physical exhibitions weren’t able to open.

Vermont Art Online is a resource for teachers, families and a wider global audience that offers virtual tours of art museums and galleries throughout the state of Vermont.

“At a time when billions of people around the world are separated from one another, museums can bring us together.”

Ernesto Ottone, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture

Visible social impact

As well as benefiting those visiting the online museums, the virtual museum and gallery site also helps to increase institutions’ visibility by increasing traffic to their web pages. As curators and educators with digital media backgrounds, they used their skills and local connections to empower fellow curators. “The fact that we have such a close-knit network in Vermont made it possible to carry out this collaboration in such a short time frame.” Sarah Laursen

Using ThingLink to create the virtual tour

The ThingLink exhibits were embedded in the Vermont Art Online website, which was distributed to media outlets, cultural institutions, and educational networks. The landing page for the ThingLink tours is an interactive map of Vermont. Clicking on a museum icon brings visitors to the landing page of an individual museum or gallery. From there, icons link to information about the institution and ways to support it, and an arrow leads the visitor into the site and through up to three linked photo spheres. In cases where 360 photos could not be taken because of safety concerns, 2D installation shots were used instead. The tours are annotated with text, photos, external links, and video provided by the Vermont curators and their websites.

Creating 360 images for the virtual tour

Google Street View* was integral to their approach. “We sent curators a video tutorial for the Google Street View app and asked them to send us photospheres, high-res images, and content to annotate them. I (Sarah Laursen) began working on the ThingLink pages and Sarah Briggs designed a Squarespace site with educational resources. Within ten days, we had signed on about 30 institutions, secured funding, built and launched the site and conducted a few press interviews!”

Sarah and Sarah knew that many staff members and even directors would be discouraged or barred from entering their galleries within a matter of days due to social distancing measures, so they asked the Vermont Curators Group to put out an immediate call to museum and gallery curators across Vermont, stressing the time-sensitive nature of the task. Once all the materials from participating institutions were collated, ThingLink was used to stitch them together into immersive virtual exhibits of the rooms, artefacts and artworks.

NEW! The easy way to create 360 images: Pano to 360

*Google Street View was deprecated in June 2023 so ThingLink developed an amazing solution to fill the gap! Read more below!

Creating virtual tours, exhibitions, escape rooms and other immersive content just got even easier! ThingLink has now launched Pano to 360 by ThingLink: an easy way to create a 360 photosphere from a panoramic image using any smartphone. For more information, including step-by-step instructions see this helpful support article. 

What are some benefits of a virtual museum?

Vermont Art Online benefits two groups: communities, and the participating institutions. Parents, teachers, and individuals looking for high-quality online arts programming have few obvious resources to turn to, especially for local content. With Vermont Art Online, a single virtual space was created where the public can easily find a range of engaging and educational experiences. This also benefits the museums and galleries who are featured on the site because it makes them visible to new audiences who might not have heard of their institution before, or thought to go to their site for online programming.

“We hope that people will discover arts and cultural organizations they have never been to, and put it on their bucket list to go when doors reopen”. Sarah Laursen and Sarah Briggs

With many thanks and well wishes to Sarah and Sarah – Vermont Art Online. They can be contacted at info@vermontartonline.org

How does a virtual museum work?

A virtual museum is really any representation of a museum or gallery in an online space, and one which can generally be navigated around by the user, with varying degrees of guidance. The Covid19 pandemic resulted in many museums accelerating their online offering and improving the online user experience. (See more on this in Museums facing COVID-19 challenges remain engaged with communities.)

We show you how easy it can be to create virtual museums in these selected case studies, which have all used ThingLink for their online exhibition design and hosting.

• Highland Folk Museum: a virtual museum which incorporates rarely-seen artefacts from the open-air museum’s archives into the interactive exhibits. Includes multimedia tags containing 3d models and 360 tours of reconstructed buildings.
• V&A Dundee: Scotland’s flagship design museum widens access to museum exhibitions with ThingLink.
• Royal Ontario Museum: ROM left behind the traditional museum approach to solve access issues. The virtual museum tour of their Great Whales exhibition is based on the exhibition in the physical museum. Includes a great example of a museum map based on “fast travel” functionality.
• Budapest Museums and Galleries: A collaborative virtual gallery of exhibits across 6 major national cultural institutions in the Hungarian capital

How to create a virtual museum, virtual art gallery or exhibition

Get started today with a trial ThingLink account. Build virtual tours of your real life space using 360 images, upload 3D models of your artefacts, share your tours or online gallery via embed, social media or even in virtual reality mode! Read more below:

Create a virtual visitor experience without a real world physical exhibition space

No exhibition space? No problem! Create a gallery of digital exhibits using our Canva template. Read more and grab the template here (free or paid-for Canva account required).

NEW! ThingLink AR App: ideal for creating interactive self-guided tours around your museum or exhibition

Join our active groups and communities on social media for more inspiration:

• ThingLink LinkedIn Page | LinkedIn Community
• X / Twitter ThingLink Page | X / Twitter ThingLink Edu Page | X / Twitter Creative Learning Design Community
• ThingLink Education Facebook Group

Or follow our YouTube channel for tutorials

• ThingLink YouTube