Will This Be the Museum of the Future?

Imagine walking into a 1,300-year-old Buddhist cave carved from a cliff overlooking a stretch of the ancient Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. You point your flashlight and frescoes showing musicians and bodhisattvas come alive with sound and color. The experience is life-changing. Now imagine doing all that in a room in a museum thousands of miles from the Silk Road. When the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, hosted Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang last week (shown above), it marked not just a groundbreaking new standard for virtual reality exhibitions, but also a glimpse of what the museum of the future may look like. Where paintings and sculpture fill galleries today, could immersive virtual realities and 3D printed replicas of priceless originals fill the physical (and online) galleries of tomorrow? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Will This Be the Museum of the Future?"