Smithsonian Virtual Tour

I was looking at the Simonoff's (Jessica? Bob?) recent posting of pictures from the Smithsonian over on FMF. Separately, I have been reading about Google's efforts to photo/map the insides of museums, just like with their Street View app. The Simonoff picts prompted me to go see if Google had mapped the insides of the mineral hall yet. What i found instead was a wonderful app from the Smithsonian that does the same thing. Go to:
www(dot)mnh(dot)si(dot)edu/vtp/1-desktop/

Look to the upper right of your screen and click on the button marked "second," which will take you to the second floor. Clicking that button also brings up a map, and you can click on any of the blue dots in the hall of minerals to fly to that location. When you walk around, you sometimes see a camera icon that you can click to bring up better photos of areas.

I have just spent the past fifteen minutes virtually walking around the Smithsonian, trying to put the excellent Simonoff pictures in context. Much FUN!

I wonder when Google or other museums will put similar things up on the web.

Thanks Mark. I will do a posting here on mindat as well, but I need to decide exactly how I want to do that. There are a ton of pictures (between 400 and 500 I would say) - I have sizes for none and I know that the Smithsonian's localities are not all correct with respect to mindat's hierarchy. I know Jolyon opened a thread about museums and solicited pictures from them, but I doubt he wants a dump of 400-500 in that thread. I has considered an article, but I am not sure that quantity of pictures in an article is a good idea. Still thinking.

I did have an idea though. Mindat has quite a database of mineral pictures. I know Rock and others are working on a whole series of "Best Of" pages. But, I started to think about how easy it would be to do pages like a museum case. Imagine a page, for example:

One mineral - Many Colors
(Fluorite)
... Pictures of fluorite ....

or

One mineral - Many Colors
(Tourmaline)
... Pictures of tourmaline ....

or

One mineral - Many Shapes
(Pyrite)
.... Photos of pyrite shapes .....

or

One Mine - Many Minerals
(Franklin?)
... Photos of the many minerals ....

There could be a large number of such pages. But it would differ from the "Best Of" pages in a few ways I think. One would be that it would not have to be exhaustive (NOT every tourmaline from every locality in every color - just enough to give a whoa feeling).

Still thinking on this idea. Anyone have thoughts?

Bob

Matt,

Thanks for turning me on to that virtual tour--very impressive, although there were a couple of times where I wished I could get some detail of the mineral I was looking at (after clicking on the camera icon).

Bob,

I came away thinking the same thing as you, and I think it's a wonderful idea. The whole idea here is diversity, and the number of images need only make that point. I can see the need for some essential text covering basic stuff like colors, shapes, growth, and so forth. Frankly, this kind of thing would be a living project--one that could be worked on in progress. Mindat would be a natural for championing this kind of project.

John

Very interesting! Thank you fo r the link.

However, it seems to me there is no way to read any info about specimen in pictures: say species, locality, ...
It is really a great, great drawback!

Luca B.

Bob,
Excellent idea. I'd like to see displays of all cubic minerals, all spherical, all triclinic, all the heaviest SG order, or hardest, etc.. Books print lists like these, but not with pictures. 'Search minerals by properties' approximates this, if you click only the "ima approved' box and then only click one other box, but there is no script with it. That would be more appealing, informative. Great potential in your idea, now who's got the time?! The Best Minerals program is huge, and very good already.

Bob,
I saw some of your museum pics on FMF.
It would sure be great if you could somehow get your pictures into that Smithsonian virtual tour!
By the way, it is great how you include the label with every specimen.

Maybe Jolyon can adopt the google streetview software to be used in all the worlds mineral museums.
We could use it for the mines also.

-Dean Allum