Show HN: A walkable 3D art history museum built from Wikipedia

(artmuseum.artfrompixels.com)

74 points | by jasontr 3 hours ago

28 comments

  • crazygringo 47 minutes ago
    This is incredibly cool. It's been a while since I felt this inspired by something on HN. Congratulations on the idea and the implementation!

    I genuinely think there's an opportunity for someone (yourself, or someone else) to turn this into a genuinely social experience, a modern museum platform.

    I'd love to see people's avatars walking around in some suitably tasteful way, with general info on location/age/sex/occupation. Be able to indicate if you're open to chatting.

    Work with actual art historians to give prerecorded virtual tours that start every hour or something, so you can be part of a group following around.

    There's something special about the museum experience, and the idea of virtualizing it in a way that makes it accessible to everyone, just through your browser rather than VR goggles, feels somehow a little bit magic.

    Let people curate their own wing layouts and architecture and own art selection and where each painting gets hung. Have leaderboards of the most popular ones, and each wing can build doors that transition to other selected wings.

    I genuinely think something like this could become "the" virtual museum, the same way Wikipedia is "the" electronic encyclopedia. It's just such a fundamentally different experience from how you currently browse museum's collections electronically.

  • ggerules 59 minutes ago
    This is an awesome project. It could bring the art museum experience to those that can't travel to museums.

    But it is missing so many artists and art movements. A better choice of source material and way more artists can be found on wikiart.org [0]. Maybe the creator could merge scraping efforts?

    [0] wikiart.org.

    • jasontr 55 minutes ago
      wow i want not aware wikiart.org. indeed a better source ! since i have the infra i will include that too!! thank you a lot!!!
  • alexpatin 49 minutes ago
    This is super cool and I look forward to sharing with my art friends. One piece of unsolicited feedback: it is really nice to focus on a particular image in the gallery, but when I'm done, it puts me back in normal cursor mode and I have to click to 'step inside' again. Minor annoyance. Otherwise really neat.
  • frmfrm 25 minutes ago
    Very cool! What stood out is there seems to be a canvas pattern added to the images, which the original don't have. I get it adds a nice touch of lighting but I'd prefer to switch that off to see the image without modifications. Great work!
  • hudecekdev 17 minutes ago
    This is very well done! Thank you. Spent a surprising amount of time looking at paintings. VR would be awesome.
  • albertodenia 2 hours ago
    Great project! Any plans to support VR?
    • jasontr 1 hour ago
      Not ATM ! Thinking of curating more the content and also add an audioguide about the life of each painter as well as some details when you come close to famous paintings. But a nice idea, but it would need better resolution of the paintings (not possible atm since are from wikipedia).
  • Soliddune16 1 hour ago
    Agree on the museum sources, and the bit worth adding is most of them serve IIIF so you can pull deep zoom tiles instead of one huge texture.
    • jasontr 1 hour ago
      IIIF i did not know very interesting. will look into it!!! ty
  • aogaili 1 hour ago
    What is strange is that last year I spent a lot of time creating the exact same 3D gallery experience with Claude. I picked up the style of the lights, the benches, the walls, the cards position. I also added music, lights on top of the images and the exact tour experience.

    A year later, I see a very similar implementation!...I find that very odd.

    But I do like the experience and site, there are few things I can pick from it myself for the project I've.

    But it seems to me anything you use Claude for will be used aggressively to train the next model and some else in same prompting space can recreate it.

    Not take the anything from the author's work, mine was in a slightly different context.

    • jasontr 50 minutes ago
      Indeed i have seen the concept on youtube back in the days. Also what you saying I agree too, about big LLMs that are trained on others people work (i.e. math). it started as single prompt so the model did its own work with a hight probability of using others people work, after that i worked a lot on this. In the future I am sure that i will use my work too.

      Nevertheless, I have gathered many ideas from the comments. if you are interested we can cooperate on the project. its a project out of pure interest exporing on more ways to ingest/spread knowledge.

  • whycombinetor 1 hour ago
    Very cool, but I can't seem to jump up onto the benches, even with crouch jumping.
    • jasontr 59 minutes ago
      hehe i know right, i was waiting for this! this is supposed to be for educational purposes, but since you want a bit of fun to press P on your keyboard and for password do Vandalism0
  • seemaze 1 hour ago
    Very cool, would love to experience (ultra) high resolution presentations of the art. I was the kid that always got scolded by putting my nose up to the cavas to see the brush strokes..
  • serf 46 minutes ago
    feels like with all these edutainment demos that AI is enabling that i'm back playing with Encarta as a kid. Good work.

    It's a shame that the real-world-metaphor computer stuff fell out of favor. microsoft bob, etc. It's not that efficient but it's so well self-explained ; to see more art you walk around a museum; who'da thought.

  • mariotacke 53 minutes ago
    Really well executed! Would love a (fuzzy) search to look for certain artists, additional filters, such as by-continent, by-country, etc.
    • jasontr 49 minutes ago
      There is Explore button where you can search but noted about more filters i will enchance it!
  • luxcem 2 hours ago
    It would be great to add curated exhibitions alongside the single-artist retrospectives: rooms mixing works by several artists, the way a museum curator would assemble a show.
    • jasontr 1 hour ago
      really nice idea working on this next. Thank you!!
  • jschveibinz 51 minutes ago
    This is very, very well done. Thank you.
  • AIblemblio 2 hours ago
    I would like a more curated version of this or a more 'hard room setup' because brains can remember things better with more context.

    Going up to the xy ara or through a japanese space helps.

    Nonetheless, nice expeirment.

    • jasontr 1 hour ago
      nice maybe rooms designed not just from a generic historical period but themed from the painters specific life moments / or specific era? will work on that, thank you
      • AIblemblio 48 minutes ago
        Uh the history / growth of an artist, love it :)
  • zero0529 1 hour ago
    I was really surprised by this. Well done.
  • micahdittmar 2 hours ago
    This is how I'd like to consume all my information
    • jasontr 1 hour ago
      I agree! thinking of going beyond art to include national history. Being Greek, I plan to try Greek history next. Again a museum with paintings sculptures docuemntaty videos transcripts etc.
  • pavi-t 52 minutes ago
    lovely! thank you
  • kapsakalis 1 hour ago
    great experience! really good work
  • justkat91 2 hours ago
    nice! if you add also an audioguide it will complete the experience!
    • jasontr 2 hours ago
      every artist every work under one roof! audioguide regarding their life and some specific details when come close to a famous painting, indeed sounds nice.
    • jasontr 2 hours ago
      noted!
  • tg1482 2 hours ago
    beauty
  • klolol 7 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • jasontr 3 hours ago
    [dead]
  • yannis_prais 3 hours ago
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  • yannis_prais 3 hours ago
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