The Lost Museum is an interactive digital museum that contains information on P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. The information on the site is given to visitors in the traditional way — an index of references and essays in the Archive tab — but also in a unique way: a 3-D, virtual reality experience where visitors can tour the museum and collect information that way. There’s also a special component for younger knowledge-seekers where they can solve a mystery on the site by using the 3-D environments and looking for clues. It gives them the experience of seeing the museum for themselves and learning about its history without leaving the computer. These VR components make learning and understanding the past way more enjoyable and fun for students, so this site could easily be incorporated into classrooms (hence, the classroom tab shown above and below).
The interactiveness of the murder-mystery game, mixed with facts about P.T. Barnum’s history, is also a great way to make students want to seek out information for themselves, instead of being forced to. Sites like this one and virtual reality technology, in general, have the potential to usher in a new era of students that can learn from the past without needing archives, books, or the need to leave a classroom — they can experience the past and live through experiences virtually, which is unlike any learning experience ever used before. I think it’s important for students and scholars alike to use what we have now, in the future, to discover and chronical the past.
-Sarah DeLena