Putting a Gallery Online: 3D Exhibits Visitors Can Walk From Home
A temporary show comes down after a few months. A virtual museum exhibit built from a 3D capture stays open to anyone, with labels, audio and links pinned to the objects.
The show closes on Sunday. The crates arrive on Monday, the walls are repainted by Thursday, and the only thing left of eight months of work is a catalogue and a folder of photographs taken at the opening. A virtual museum exhibit changes that ending: the rooms, the hang and the spacing between objects stay open to anyone with a link.
This post is for curators and digital teams who already know what a good gallery visit feels like and want to know what carrying one online involves. It covers what to capture, in what order, and what the visitor gets at the other end.
The problem with a show that ends
Temporary exhibitions are the part of a programme that most people never see. Visitors come from the same postcode, in the same months, and the rest of the audience gets a press image and a paragraph. Loan shows are worse, and they are the ones a virtual museum exhibit helps most. The objects go home, the lenders' terms often rule out anything but a short window, and the room itself is the only record of how the pieces spoke to each other.
The usual substitutes each lose something. Photographs of single objects lose the room. A scrolling image gallery loses scale, so a four-metre canvas and a postcard-sized drawing sit at the same size on screen. A 360 panorama gives you the room but pins you to fixed spots, with no way to step closer to a case or read a label at a natural distance.
Then there is access. A visitor who cannot climb stairs, cannot travel, or cannot take a day off on a weekday gets the catalogue or nothing. The online gallery tour was meant to fix this, and mostly delivers a slideshow.
What a virtual museum exhibit changes
A virtual museum exhibit of this kind is built from photographs or video of the finished installation. Gaussian splatting reconstructs the room as a continuous, photoreal scene, so a visitor moves through it freely instead of hopping between panorama points. Walls, plinths, lighting and the distance between works all survive, because they were in the footage.
What it demands is more modest than people expect. There is no scanner to hire and no mesh to retopologise. You need the room finished, lit as it will be for visitors, and an hour or two of access when it is empty.
What it produces is a scene that opens in a browser on a phone, tablet, laptop or headset, with no app to install. That matters for digital collection access: the audience you are trying to reach is the one least likely to download anything.
The scene records the installation as it was on one day. If a work is rehung or loaned out mid-run, capture again once the layout settles, rather than patching the old scene.
The workflow
For a virtual museum exhibit of a mid-sized room, plan one working day of capture and one of editing. Large multi-room shows take longer, and the time is mostly walking, not technology.
Capture the empty room
Shoot before opening hours, or during a closure day. Locked-off lighting beats mixed daylight, so close blinds on windows that change through the day if you can. Switch off anything flickering. Ask for the room to be clear of staff and installers, since people moving through a capture become ghosted shapes.
You have three practical inputs. Phone or DSLR stills work well for small rooms, and the image-to-3D workflow covers how to space them. Ordinary video, in MP4 or MOV, suits a single continuous pass, and the video-to-3D route takes it as is. A 360 camera, such as an Insta360 or Ricoh Theta, is quickest for big halls, and 360-to-3D handles equirectangular footage.
Walk it once, slowly
Move at a steady walking pace with the camera at chest height, passing each wall in a slow arc rather than a straight line, so every surface is seen from more than one angle. Then do a second pass at a different height or from the opposite direction. Glass cases and reflective frames are the hard parts. Angle yourself so you are not mirrored in them, and take extra passes near the cases you care about.
Keep a note of every object you want to annotate later. A phone photo of each label doubles as your reference for the editing stage.
Process in the cloud
Upload the footage and leave it. Processing runs in the cloud and takes between 10 and 120 minutes depending on the size of the capture, with no local GPU and nothing to install. The result is a Gaussian splat scene you can open straight away. The viewer reads .spz, .ply, .splat and .ksplat, so a scene reconstructed elsewhere can be brought in too.
Place labels, audio and links
This is where a recording becomes a virtual museum exhibit. In the Captures Studio editor, you pin hotspots to the objects themselves. A hotspot can carry text, an image, a video or a link, and the editor supports audio too, so a curator's voice can sit on the work it is describing.
Use the hotspot for what a wall label would hold: maker, date, medium, a short interpretive line. Then use its extra room for what a wall cannot hold. A close-up of the back of a canvas. A conservator's note. A link to the catalogue record, so the object in the scene and the entry in your collections system point at each other.
Set a route, then publish
Add a guided camera path so first-time visitors have an opening sequence: enter at the door, pause at the lead work, then let them go. Free movement stays available. Publish and the virtual museum exhibit becomes a link, an embed for your own site, or a QR code that can go on the printed invitation, on a poster, or on the wall outside the empty gallery. For a series of rooms, a tour strings several scenes into one ordered showcase, and the interactive storytelling page shows what that can look like in practice.
Today's options against a 3D capture
| Catalogue and photos | 360 panorama | Walkable 3D capture | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shows the room and the hang | No | Yes, from fixed points | Yes, from anywhere inside |
| Sense of scale between works | Weak | Moderate | Strong |
| Labels and media pinned to objects | Separate captions | Possible, per point | Pinned to the object in the scene |
| Time in the room | Per object, over days | An hour or two | An hour or two |
| Works on a phone with no app | Yes | Usually | Yes |
| Lasts after the show comes down | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Objections
"It will not look like the real thing"
It will not, and no screen does. What it keeps is the proportion and sequence: how large the work was against the wall, what you saw next. That is the information photographs discard. Fine surface detail, such as brushwork or glaze, is better served by your existing high-resolution object photography, linked from the hotspot.
"Lenders will not allow it"
Check the loan agreement, because many agreements restrict reproduction of the objects, not the installation view. Ask the registrar before you capture, not after. If a work cannot appear, you can leave that wall out of the scene, or capture the room with that work absent.
"Who maintains it?"
The scene is a file and a link. It does not need updating when browsers change, and the content in the hotspots is edited in the same place it was created. Your digital team owns a published URL, not a platform.
"Visitors will stop coming in person"
Nobody needs to take that on faith. A virtual museum exhibit reaches people who were never going to travel, and it can act as the preview that sends the others. You can test it for one show and look at what your own visitor figures do.
Where it sits in a programme
A permanent collection hall earns its capture once, and then twice more when the hang changes. A temporary show earns it before it closes. A touring show can be captured at each venue, so that the same objects are seen in the different rooms that held them.
Any virtual museum exhibit also pairs with preservation work. If your concern is the building rather than the programme, the heritage documentation post covers capturing a site as it stands. If you want to see how others present shared captures, the community page lists scenes that anyone can open.
FAQ
How long does a gallery capture take?
For a mid-sized room, plan roughly an hour or two of filming when the space is empty. Processing then runs in the cloud and takes 10 to 120 minutes depending on the size of the capture. Annotating the objects is the longest step, and it scales with how many works you want to describe.
Do visitors need an app or a headset?
No. The published scene opens in a browser on a phone, tablet or desktop, and it can also be viewed in a VR headset if a visitor has one. You share it as a link, an embed on your own website or a QR code.
Can labels, audio and links be attached to individual objects?
Yes. Hotspots are placed on the objects in the scene and carry text, images, video and links, and audio can be attached as well. A curator can pin a short spoken introduction to the lead work and a catalogue link to every other piece.
Does the scene stay online after the show closes?
Yes. A virtual museum exhibit is a file you keep and a link you control, so it remains open to visitors for as long as you choose to publish it. That is the point: the installation view outlasts the installation.
The crates still arrive on Monday and the walls are still repainted. What changes is that the virtual museum exhibit is no longer one of the things taken down. A few hours of filming, a cloud job that finishes within the afternoon and an editing pass with the curator beside you leave a room that anyone can enter, long after the lights have gone out in the real one.