Virtual Tours…For When Travel is on Hold
Travel sometimes needs to be put on hold…a busy season of extracurricular activities, health challenges, and /or weather challenges. Let’s face it life gets busy. The beauty of technology is that some museums, national parks, aquariums, and zoos offer virtual tours. Below are a few of the many virtual tours that are available.
The Johnson Space Center has five virtual tours: Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, Flight Control Room-1 (FCR-1), Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), Ellington Field, and Lunar Sample Curation Laboratory.
The virtual tours allow the visitor to the website to go up, down, left or right. The visitor can also zoom in and zoom out. There are information bubbles that the visitor can click on which provide additional information.
The Louvre also has five virtual tours: FROM AFAR. TRAVELLING MATERIALS AND OBJECTS, THE ADVENT OF THE ARTIST, POWER PLAYS, THE BODY IN MOVEMENT, and FOUNDING MYTHS: FROM HERCULES TO DARTH VADER.
Visitors to this virtual tour can use the arrows on the keyboard to go up, down, left, and rights. Arrows on the virtual tour guide the visitor to specific exhibits. Information bubbles provide additional information.
The Louvre website has a kids section: Louvre Kids. This section of the Louvre website has interesting videos for kids that provide background information about various works that are a apart of the Louvre collection.
A virtual tour of the Van Gogh Museum was created by Google Arts and Culture.
As the visitor scrolls down through the site, the website provides sections that provide information about Van Gogh’s well known paintings and the website provides sections that allow the visitor to navigate through the museum using arrows, mouse, or the arrow keys.
Visitors will be able to do a virtual tour of the secret annex where Anne Frank lived and wrote her diary.
The different parts that the visitor will be able to see include: the bookcase; the entrance; Otto, Edith, and Margot’s room; Anne and Fritz’s room; the bathroom; Hermann and Auguste’s room; Peter’s room; and the attic.
In some of the rooms, visitors are given the option of clicking on a “play” symbol. Visitors who click on this will be taken to a YouTube video, which will provide additional information.
The door symbol will take the visitor to the next room.
The symbol with three lines will provide the visitor with information in the form of text.
Visitors can use their mouse to navigate around the rooms.
The webcams that were made available through the Smithsonian National Zoo are not exactly virtual tours, but the webcams do give the visitor the experience of experiencing something up close and personal. In reality, visitors watching the webcams probably get to see the animals more up close and personal than the people visiting the actual zoo.
The webcam that are available include the naked mole rat, the lion, and the elephant.
