VISITING a museum no longer entails wandering around a brick-and-mortar building looking at depressing antiques and boring introduction boards in today’s China. Now, downloading a mobile app or scanning a barcode can be equally educational and entertaining.

    Museums across China have been putting a lot of effort into developing mobile applications and brainstorming creative ways to present their artifacts.

    The Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, in Beijing released a new app in April that enables smartphone users to interact better with its treasured ceramics. The developers scanned 400 items out of the 350,000 ceramics stored in the museum. By downloading the app, visitors can get a 360-degree view of the selected items while a voice guide explains the details.

    In January, the museum launched an interactive app of an ancient Chinese painting. By allowing viewers to explore the settings and different facial expressions of more than 40 figures in the painting, the app offers a glimpse of the lifestyle of the ruling class in ancient China.

    The Shaanxi History Museum in the northwestern city of Xi’an has been a pioneer in using digital platforms for exhibiting antiques. So far, 208 public and private museums and memorials in Shaanxi Province have opened online exhibition halls.

    During the past three years, more than 500,000 visitors from 100 countries have gained access to the rich cultural heritage and history of China through digital museums, said Shao Xiaolong, director of the provincial cultural relics data center.

    “In addition to virtual scenes and 3-D interactive displays, digital museums are also expanding their territory to mobile apps and social platforms such as Weibo and WeChat,” said Zhang Qing, president of Time Machine Image Center, a Beijing-based digital image company.

    Panoramic camera shooting, virtual reality and augmented reality are trendy technologies in today’s digital museum construction, Zhang said.

    For Li Yuan, a former film animator who began running an independent online museum in 2010, exhibiting items on the Internet is just “the tip of the iceberg” of what a digital museum can achieve. He expects a display revolution.

    “Big data is the core of a digital museum,” Li said. “Through data analysis of hundreds of thousands of digitalized antiques, including books, murals, stone tablets and various other items, teaching, researching and many more functions can be realized in an efficient manner that is unprecedented.”

    (Xinhua)