Virtual Gallerie, LLC (VG) provides museums and galleries with leading-edge 3D visualization software to plan their spaces and exhibitions online. The company’s mission is to enable museum and gallery exhibition planners to visualize their creations in interactive 3D and share them online with their peers and the public.

VG can enhance their clients’ curatorial and architectural design processes, reduce the related costs and improve the visualization of their exhibitions. Other applications of the 3D software include virtual exhibition tours for Web visitors, showing prospective donors how their art work would look in an exhibition space, 3D tools for smaller galleries, and a medium for students to learn the art of curation. Through close interaction with clients and customized feedback, VG creates specialized, easy-to-use products, across multiple channels.

Virtual Gallerie Curator (VGC) is a 3D curatorial and architectural design tool. It allows curators and exhibition planners to import AutoCAD files, or similar architectural renderings, in order to view their work in interactive 3D online. Users can arrange new, temporary and/or permanent exhibitions; and they can hang paintings, arrange sculpture or other 3D objects, move and/or paint walls, estimate building costs, and perform other tasks in a 3D virtual gallery that they would otherwise perform in the physical world. VGC may be used in tandem with museum’s collection management software, allowing users to import images, multimedia and other pertinent information to VGC and create a 3D version of their museum.

Virtual Gallerie Walkthrough (VGW) is an online 3D photo-realistic virtual tour of a museum’s galleries. VGW has the same interfaces as VGC, but permits users to walk virtually through a museum and interact with objects in that space. VGW can be custom-designed with a variety of interactive content, including basic text, biographies, audio, video, high-resolution zooming, image archives, e-commerce applications and other multimedia. It can be programmed to create a fly-by of the museum, allowing users to see a movie that moves through the museum with narration, or other interactive elements.

There are a variety of applications for VG’s software:

• Curatorial and architectural design
• 3D online virtual tours
• Sponsorship/donation tool – clients have used VG’s tools to show potential sponsors a preview of an exhibition, or potential donors how their art would look in the museum; and
• Education – the tools may be customized to create an instructional program for teaching students the art of curation.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the largest encyclopedic museum in the Los Angeles area, with more than 100,000 works of art in their collection and five buildings of exhibition space, has been working with VG for more than two years. VG has built an interior 3D model of each building for the purposes of exhibition planning. LACMA continues to use VG Curator to design, build and plan their permanent and temporary art exhibitions; and they have plans to utilize the product in the future for such uses as 3D online museum tours, curatorial education and other external applications.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, MO (MLKAM), part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, includes a five-building complex with three historic structures and two new buildings – a museum building and a building for the College of Art. Both are scheduled for completion some time in 2006. VG started working with MLKAM in 2005 and has built them an interior 3D model of the exhibition space in their new building. MLKAM uses VG Curator for their exhibition planning operations and for curatorial education at the university.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum (NBHOF), Cooperstown, NY, is one of the country’s most popular destinations. It is housed in a three-story red brick building and it serves as a repository of baseball’s treasures, as well as the historic Hall of Fame Gallery, where the plaques of all 256 Hall of Fame members line the oak walls. VG has worked with NBHOF since 2004 in recreating 3D models of old classic baseball stadiums that were torn down in the last 100 years. The museum’s newest exhibit, Sacred Ground, features virtual tours of these stadiums where visitors can “walk through” them, view multimedia content, and experience interactive 3D on a large 15' x 10' curved screen.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a major modern art museum and the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art. Its building is a modern architectural landmark and is located in the SOMA district of San Francisco. VG began working with SFMOMA in 2006 on a pilot project to build a 3D model of one of their temporary exhibition galleries. The SFMOMA plans to use VG Curator in a six-month test for the exhibition planning of this temporary space.

The de Young Museum was founded in 1895 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and it has been an integral part of the cultural fabric of the city for more than 100 years. Part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the de Young re-opened its doors in October 2005 in a new state-of-the-art facility that showcases collections from the 17th through the 20th centuries, and art of the native Americas, Africa, and the Pacific. VG began working with the de Young in 2005 on a pilot project to build a 3D model of one of their temporary exhibition galleries. The de Young plans to use VG Curator in a six-month test for the exhibition planning of this temporary space. eb