A coming Olympic flame of web: Digital Olympic Museum

Can you image that you can choose any angles and see more views than the audience in the locale when you watch the Olympic Games on the internet? Do you want to see the vivid gymnasium, old Olympic Games site or gymnastic art just at home? Do you hope to experience the traditional Chinese and Grecian sports and enjoy the great fun from these specialties? Do these sound cool? So if this project named “DOM (Digital Olympic Museum)” completes, all these dreams can come true.

Many people are familiar with “Virtual Museum” which had appeared in the last century. However, for the sake of technology limitation, these earlier museums mainly used the word, picture or video which lacked of interaction. To solve this, the cooperation between MSRA and the Virtual Reality lab of Beihang University aim to build a digital Olympic museum to give the true feeling for audience. This project also gained the fund from National Natural Science Foundation of China.

• Real time interaction and multi-angles video system
  By using this system to shoot and then play on the internet at the same time, user can have a novel vision experience which means they can control the angle and see any aspect or point. So this can give them superior experience than the audience in the gymnasium.
• Online cultural relic display
  To use the laser 3D scan technology, this virtual Olympic museum can build a lot of verisimilitude models, vary from art statuary, and sport apparatus to the whole gymnasium. As a result, people don’t need to travel many place to enjoy it.
• Participate in the amazing classical sport
  This virtual Olympic museum includes Beijing Olympic, modern Olympic, traditional Chinese and Grecian sports which demonstrate the history of world sport by comparing the similarities and differences between China and western. To let people follow the “Participate” spirit, technician create many simulation activities which enable user to experience many classical sports of Greece and China. They use the Motion Capture technology to collect the data of athlete’s motion, then process and control the motion of 3D virtual people in the computer which result in a birth of “Motion editor”. Based on this, people can experience the Grecian long jump games, Chinese “Five animal games” and “polite shooting”, etc.

Embody sports, information technology, new media and art, this multi-subject based project can facilitate people to roam in the whole Olympic Museum and enjoy the fun of kinds of sports just by a web browser. By using video, 3D graph and advanced interaction between user and people, it now brings a new era of experience. Is it cool? We expect its advent.

See more at: http://www.ibeijing.gov.cn/index.html