Creation of a Virtual Museum for the Dissemination of 3D Models of Historical Clothing

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for an interesting article. However, I must suggest major revisions before publication, which includes:

• The link to the virtual museum does not work. I have tried it on different devices. So I don't know whether the results are correct or the museum is still in the phase of testing.

•  

  The article lacks scientific soundness due to well-structured but descriptive content, without a goal and research hypothesis. Lines 176-180 explain the aims of the project, but not of the paper. I suggest you organising and rephrasing the first two sections in a way that explains how your project contributes to the academic community. For example, the development of new models and/or processes in creating 3D models that do not copy an existing museum or object. The current form is more of a project report than a scientific article. Accordingly, results and concussions should be enriched in line with your goals.

I am looking forward to the improved version of your manuscript.

Author Response

Please read the author's reply at the attached file 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript describes in detail a virtual museum which makes reconstructions of historical clothing accessible to the general public. The digital content provided at the exhibition is not available in the material form, the virtual collection is therefore the only possible mean of dissemination of such kind of heritage. Thus, the paper is interesting for an international reader and should be published. Although the virtual museums gained much interest from scholars, and many papers appeared over the last few years, scientific contributions to that topic ought to be welcomed.

However, there are certain points that should be addressed to make sure that the manuscript is a true scientific paper. I list them below. The methods and results are fine to me, although the latter require some more elaboration, thus I recommend minor revision of the manuscript.

Most important notes:

1) In the Material and methods section a complete list of sources of information used to reconstruct the historical clothing should be provided. If there are many sources, a digital supplement can be a solution. At the moment, you refer to two books in the Tools and software chapter (see lines 301-302). Detailed descriptions of two other sources (references [27] and [28] are also provided there, in lines 295-299. All information regarding sources should be, in my opinion, placed in the Material and methods section. Please note that according to other authors poor organisation of sources is a serious drawback of many papers devoted to virtual museums (Povroznik, 2018).

2) Lines 176-181 (aim of the study) - You aim at developing an easily accessible virtual museum. However, this is more a technical problem or a material for a case study, but for scientific study a clearly formulated scientific problem is required. For example, in the Results you mention initial tests of the museum (lines 388-392). Thus, your problem could be related to the perception of 3D models of clothings by the lay public. I agree that in many studies that introduce a new software or a framework this component is absent (for example in other recent, published paper there are only some screenshots of interactions on Twitter provided in the appendix, and the discussion is very limited), but in my opinion for the highest scientific standards we should definitely introduce more strict and clear problems and aims.

3) Results section - Obviously, the virtual museum is a main outcome of your work. But for the scientific paper we need some data. This is a good place to give the reader the details on the number of characters, clothings, how they are dispersed among the social groups. I agree that such information appears in the manuscript, but is scattered among chapters. If there is a possibility of adding a small table with these numbers, placed in the Results section, then I would definitely recommend it.

4) Results section - There is another point at which more data can be provided. In lines 388-392 you mention initial tests (see also comment no. 2) of your museum. Is it possible to give more details related to the perception of the website by the public? For example, which details of the costumes were found the most interesting? (Possibly you can save some processing power by limiting other details in the future; in lines 321-334 you selected the details that seem to be less essential, but it is the visitor who decides what he wants to see). Are there any models that gained most of the visitors' attention? I know that there is no time to design a new study with new group of museum visitors, but according to lines 390-392 you probably have answer to some of these questions. This will add an additional portion of qualitative data to your results and make your scientific contribution more sound.

Some minor comments, not related to the overall merit:

1) The title: Is the museum interactive at the moment? Note that in the conclusions you list interactive features such as characters that respond to user's activities as planned in the future. "Interactive virtual museum" can be therefore a little bit confusing.

2) Lines 38-39 - "virtual museums (...) are a feasible resource for disseminating content on the network" - to make this statement more concrete, you may refer to papers on the educational potential of virtual museums, e.g. Daniela (2020).

3) Lines 51-62 - Here, you refer in detail to Matterport, but I am convinced that there are other frameworks that can be used for a complete setup of a virtual museum. Some of them offer a complete interoperability with Europeana collections, that you discuss in next chapter: for example, DynaMus framework (Kiourt et al., 2016). Instead of providing a detailed description of Matterport, you could refer to other frameworks and potentially explain to reader their drawbacks and the rationale for not using them in your work.

4) Line 128 - Are you sure that Europeana Fashion is one of the Google's assets? I think that the project was founded by the European Union. Note that the name should be in capital letters; the same problem appears in line 166 ("google").

5) Lines 183-195 - I am not sure if this paragraph belongs to Material and methods chapter. The description of the larger project in which you place your research fits better to the introduction, when you describe the context and aim of your work.

6) As a non-native I am not able to decide if additional proof reading is necessary, but there are some minor errors, that should be corrected: Lines 218-219 - "colorful and colorful costumes"

7) Line 364 - I agree that the HTML5 and Javascript are necessary, but this line suggests that the virtual museum will work at any PC with HTML5/JS internet browser, which is probably not true (WebGL is also required, I suppose).

8) Lines 381-382 - Here, in the Results section, you repeat the information from lines 358-360. Please remove the repetitions.

9) Line 398: "satisfactory results. However" - comma instead of the full stop?

10) Line 435: "information panels" - You plan to add explanatory panels in the future, but presumably at this stage there is some metadata related to the objects, for example the references to the sources from which the details of fabric and textures of clothings were retrieved. If yes, then it would be useful to state that, somewhere in the Tools and software section, and to explain which metadata standards are used.

11) Line 437: "possibility of interaction with the models, such as talking, etc" - this is an interesting plan for the future, but you could want to make an additional clause (here or somewhere earlier, in the Discussion chapter) that such advanced virtual interactions do not necessary improve educational outcomes (Sylaiou et al., 2017). This could also be used as a reason for not including these features in the present version of your virtual museum.

12) References [10], [18], [20], [22], [23], [24], [29], [34] - Note that in these references Spanish phrases occur ("Último acceso:", "En línea"), and these should be translated to English.

13) Reference [18] - You could provide a direct link to Europeana homepage, not to the reference in Wikipedia that redirects there.

To sum up, the manuscript is a solid contribution to the virtual museum theme, but some minor changes in structure are required to publish this material as a scientific paper in a scientific journal.

References:

Daniela, L. (2020). Virtual museums as learning agents. Sustainability, 12(7), 2698.

Kiourt, C., Koutsoudis, A., & Pavlidis, G. (2016). DynaMus: A fully dynamic 3D virtual museum framework. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 22, 984-991.

Povroznik, N. (2018). Virtual Museums and Cultural Heritage: Challenges and Solutions. In DHN (pp. 394-402).

Sylaiou, S., Mania, K., Paliokas, I., Pujol-Tost, L., Killintzis, V., & Liarokapis, F. (2017). Exploring the educational impact of diverse technologies in online virtual museums. International Journal of Arts and Technology, 10(1), 58-84.

Author Response

Please read the author's reply at the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The article presents an innovative way of presenting cultural heritage. The topic is interesting, but the paper needs for some improvement before publication.

English need to be improved in several parts of the text. In many sentences the same word is repeated several times. This happens in particular with the words “museum” and “information”.

The structure of the article is a bit unusual and a reorganization of the paragraph might be necessary to help the reader. For example, in the Material and methods, it might be useful to separate this section in two sub-paragraphs, one on “Costume’s choice” (lines 183-235) and one on the “Tools and software” (lines 237-243). The paragraph “Tools and software” should start few lines after (line 244) and renamed. The reviewer suggests to use “Workflow” for this paragraph. The paragraph “Results” should be named “Results and discussion” or “Discussion”.

Some details about implementations and maintenance of the virtual museum need to be added in the Conclusions.

Detailed comments:

• In the abstract, there is a space separating in two the text. Is there a specific reason for that?
• Line 33: it is not clear who is the “he” mentioned in the sentence. The author of the reference [3]? Modify the sentence to make it more understandable.
• Line 46 (as well as lines 166 and 168): Google should have a capital letter.
• Line 48: again, the use of “he” might not be appropriate. Check and correct accordingly.
• Lines 64-68: separate the sentence and two and rephrase.
• Lines 73-77: rephrase. There is twice a “that”, introducing a subordinate sentence, in the same paragraph.
• At the end of the introduction, lines 78-85, the authors should specify what is used in purely virtual museums to recreate “non-existing objects”: documents? drawings/paintings? other kind of documentary sources?
• Lines 102-106: rephrase, create shorter sentences and avoid repetition of terms.
• Lines 108-120: the location (city, country) of these museums should be specified.
• Line 124: the county and/or type of the DDM project should be specified.
• Line 155: add “there” between “clothing,” and “are”
• Line 182 (Material and methods section): as mentioned above, it might be useful to add two sub-paragraphs in this section, one on “Costume’s choice” (lines 183-235) and one on the “Tools and software” (lines 237-243)
• Lines 196-201: rephrase.
• Line 236 (Tools and software section): this paragraph should be renamed something like “Workflow” and start at line 244 instead of 237.
• Line 270: if the paragraphs are reorganized, this subtitle is probably no longer necessary.
• Lines 291-305: this is somehow the core of the paper and should be separated from the rest of the paragraph (dealing with software use for the purposes of creating a virtual museum) and valorized.
• Lines 323-334: the aim of this project is to create a virtual museum of clothing. The realization of the virtual dresses, with their details should be the priority. What is exactly the problem highlighted by the authors in these lines? An issue of computer capacities to create the costumes? Or the problem might be the visualization by the visitors? In the first case, wouldn’t be possible to give priority to the details of the dresses and to remove details elsewhere (for example from the “mannequins”)?
• Line 337: the source of the Figure 4a should be cited.
• Line 371: to the reviewers the content of this paragraph seems more like a discussion than a conclusion.
• Line 391: the reviewer visited the virtual museum. It might be linked to the reviewer’s computer, but the amazing details of the costumes where not so clearly visible. Moreover, the rendering quality does not seem to be the same for all the costumes. Did the authors envisage to improve the rendering some selected costumes in order to make the clothing more similar to real ones?
• Line 400: the choice of the virtual environment for the museum is a bit surprising. The chosen environment looks more like a courtyard than a museum, due to the lack of the roof and the brightness of walls and floor. Is it a temporary solution or can the authors explain why this choice? The description of certain costumes, presented as panels on the walls, is really interesting. The reviewer encourage the authors to develop this part and to add explanations for all, or almost, the costumes.

• Conclusions: in this paragraph the authors should specify how the implementation and maintenance of the virtual museum is envisaged.
• Some references contains terms in Spanish that should be translated (en linea à online).

Author Response

Please read the author's reply at the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

This text addresses a very interesting topic and perfectly inserted in what are the challenges of the new museology, increasingly adapted to the contemporary needs of digitization, especially in the particular context in which one lives, marked by the pandemic, which physically closed museums for long periods, but also as a way for the preservation of a sensitive cultural heritage such as historical clothing.

This article complies with almost all the established norms for the articles of this publication in extension and organization and offers an interesting overview of the creation process of a virtual museum from the beginning.

In the Introduction section: from my point of view, it is not properly explained the motivation, purpose of the research and its objectives, some of that information appears just in the last two paragraphs in the background section. In page 71 and 73 there is a repetition that should be deleted to make reading more enjoyable: “These types of museums…” and “This type of museum…”.

In Background section: the concept of virtual museum could be explored a little more, as well as the bibliographic reference should be improved. At this point the authors presents above all the supply side through an extensive list of examples, but the demand aspect is somehow ignored. What has been the public's support with this new way of visiting museums? Who are these audiences? A project of this nature only makes sense if it has an audience. The experiencing of cultural heritage through digital world has been increasing the engagement with heritage? There’s a lack of a more consolidated link to the issue of sustainable management of cultural heritage. Page 124 there is a repetition of the word “The” at the beginning of the sentence.

In Results section: the authors just describe the results, there´s a lack of a concrete discussion. Comparison with the results of other similar projects? No concrete and effective practical implications and proposals were specified. Will the project be replicated in the same heritage or other domain? I suggest that this section be improved.

Finally, in the reference list the authors do not follow the layout rules of the journal.  I recommend that the authors follow all the instructions for Authors of the journal (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions).

Author Response

Please read the author's reply at the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

su

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 

English was corrected by mpdi English editing service

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The article has been substantially improved and the authors answered most of the questions asked in the first review. But two questions remain:

1) the museum is accessible to the public, do the authors have any information about online visitation?  It might be interesting to include this information in the Results section.

2) the reference list the authors  is not yet in accordance with the rules of the journal. I recommend that the authors follow all the instructions for Authors of the journal 
(https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions).

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

1) the museum is accessible to the public, do the authors have any information about online visitation?  It might be interesting to include this information in the Results section.

 

It would be interesting to have information about online visitations, but at this moment we don't have it.

 

2) the reference list the authors  is not yet in accordance with the rules of the journal. I recommend that the authors follow all the instructions for Authors of the journal 
(https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions).

 

References revised following the rules of the journal.