The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, launched in December, is Museum Director Peter Friess's grand experiment in open sourcing the museum's content development process. His idea, that is, is to fill the halls of a major museum with exhibits conceived entirely by outsiders, prototyped in Second Life, and licensed under Creative Commons for all to use. Although other museums have tinkered with having visitors participate in the process of developing exhibits, or used Second Life as an alternative presentation medium, none has dared this radical step before.

So far, about three dozen projects have been set up in Second Life (out of 65 on the Website). On Friday, Feb.29, the first four of these were chosen for incorporation into the real museum. They were: Artist-in-Residence: The Painter, Musical Chairs, Wikisonic and Connecting Point: Hole in (Virtual) Space. They represent, respectively, an interactive view of the evolution of a painting over time, a musical carousel where each seat represents different instruments in an orchestra, a 3-D music box where viewers set the "pins" corresponding to the placement of notes on a staff, and a RL-SL portal through which visitors on both sides can collaborate in a variety of games. Images of these exhibits in the Second Life workshop are shown below. Click on an image for a larger view.


Artist-in-Residence was created by Marie Crandell, in real life a systems accountant from Plymouth, England. Musical Chairs was created by Leanne Garvie, a philosophy graduate student and artist from Toronto, Canada. Wikisonic is the brainchild of Jon Brouchoud, an architect and designer from Madison, WI, USA. Connecting Point is the product of a team from the Salford University, in Manchester, U.K. Alan Hook is an artist, inventor and graduate student, and Pete Wardle is a lecturer.

These four projects are every bit as varied as are their authors, but they have certain things in common. Besides scoring well on all the criteria for the exhibit competition, they share the following additional characteristics:
▪ they emphasize interaction with and participation by the viewer,
▪ their exhibit concept was developed first on the Website, and then prototyped in Second Life, and
▪ interestingly enough, their final form in real life will probably be quite different from their present appearance. Their real world instantiation will be a poetic, not a literal, interpretation of their Second Life form. This reflects the fact that real life and Second Life are quite different, particularly with regard to the way visitors can interact with an exhibit (for example, there's not much that avatars can do with their hands in Second Life).

As our Engineering Shop begins the job of interpreting and building these exhibits for our upcoming Art, Film & Music exhibition opening in June, many other promising exhibits are moving forward in Second Life. There will be two more rounds of judging, on March 15 and March 31, for Art, Film and Music, and soon selections for other exhibitions at The Tech and even for other museums.

History will tell whether this open source experiment in museum exhibit development will become commonplace, or even worth repeating. But it is here now, and these exciting exhibits are proof that it works.