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771 points abetusk | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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t43562 ◴[] No.41880199[source]
There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it.

When I see some of the virtual reconstructions of Ancient Rome or Pompeii, I wonder if the real thing will be of less interest than the reconstituted, repaired one.

I think this is normal - there are now billions of people in the world and only so much "great art". I was in a huge crowd looking at the Mona Lisa. There was nothing magical about the experience. I'd rather have my own copy or put my VR glasses on and enjoy it in, say, the house where it was first displayed.

I can see museums fearing the loss of visitors or at least fearing that someone else will make billions out of virtualising it and they won't. I mean, search engines make billions out of the knowledge other people built over centuries. AI takes open source information and code and makes billions selling the embodied knowledge that was given away for free. It's not as if corporations aren't happy to rape the commons and call themselves heroes for doing it.

This isn't a good reason for the museum's attitude but I don't look to the future free exploitation of public information with unalloyed optimism.

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rootusrootus ◴[] No.41880253[source]
> There has to be a point where seeing things in the virtual world becomes "good enough" that we won't fly thousands of miles to do it.

For certain things, I could see that. But for many things I go see, it's being there that is part of the point. Knowing that I'm seeing or touching the actual thing the artist saw and touched, or standing in a place where the builders worked build it, etc. Seeing a perfect representation misses that.

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1. SapporoChris ◴[] No.41880335[source]
It probably depends a lot on personality. For myself, I obsessively studied space exploration history as a child. When I was much older, I toured National Air and Space Museum in District of Columbia and found it terribly boring, no new knowledge, nothing I hadn't read about before.
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2. rootusrootus ◴[] No.41880489[source]
I can see your point of view. It definitely is going to depend on what you are going for. I've never gone to a museum for knowledge. I enjoyed the Smithsonian (though, aside from a few specific artifacts, I really prefer Udvar-Hazy to the museum on the mall) solely because of the feeling I got being in the presence of the actual machines that I've learned so much about. Reading about Glamorous Glennis or the Enola Gay is one thing, but to stand in front of it and think "that right there is the actual plane Chuck Yeager flew past mach 1" is 100% of why I go to the museum.