The Lost Museum is a digital, interactive museum that provides information about the showman Phineas Taylor (P.T) Barnum’s American Museum. When you first come to the website, you see a screen with a video that is about two minutes long, and I enjoyed it because it gives a lot of insight on the museum and what was happening at that time. Above the video, you can also find tabs that you can use to explore the digital museum as well, as pictured below.
If you click the “Home” button, it gives you these options seen below;
When you click on the “Explore The Museum” tab, it brings you to the virtual museum. I liked this aspect of the digital museum a lot because it almost feels as if you are walking around the museum. When you’re in the main room, you can click on other rooms to go into them. When I clicked on the room to the left with the dinosaur skeleton, a woman popped up and started talking, and then ran away before I entered the room which I thought was cool. Then when I did enter, I could see the dinosaur up close, and could even click on the little stand right in front of it that provided some information on the dinosaur. I really enjoyed that because it shows how much detail and consideration went into making this virtual museum feel like the real deal. I’ve been to a lot of museums before, and I always read the information pieces in front of the individual exhibits, so I liked that I could do that here even though I wasn’t physically in the museum.
The museum also offers a murder mystery game, which I believe would be very helpful to aid students in learning about the museum because while they are playing the game and having fun, they are also learning facts about it. Digital museums such as this one, virtual reality, or other graphic simulations of reality have so much potential to help people understand the past. For example, since The American museum in real life burnt to the ground in 1865, we would not be able to physically walk through it today. However, this online museum and this technology that we have today allows us to get pretty close to what the real thing was once like. Sites like this can and will be a major breakthrough when it comes to education as well, which I am always thinking about since I am going to be an educator. I could use this exact digital museum in my classroom one day, and my students could learn about the past without ever needing to leave the classroom, and I believe that is incredible. Though it is not what we are used to and will definitely take some adjusting too, VR and digital museums are at our fingertips- and we should take advantage of them!
Megan Bender