Intel has announced that its virtual museum experience is now ready for visitors. The museum traces over 50 years of Intel history, and you can experience it from the comfort of your home or anywhere you can get a 3G/4G/5G/Wi-Fi signal.
In a Tweet about the opening, Intel recommends that you take a walk through the virtual museum space and take a look inside its chip manufacturing plant. This is just one of many areas of the Virtual Museum where you can soak up Intel information.
For those that even visiting a virtual museum might be too much of an effort, the Embedded tweet contains a one-minute video clip encapsulating the experience. If you see something that interests you, it’s just a mouse click away to explore further.
Rather than create a bespoke virtual museum experience, Intel asked the Google Street View Maps team to walk through the brick-and-mortar museum of Santa Clara. To this map, the wandering experience has added various exhibit hotspots.
Virtual visitors can walk around the museum by clicking on the floor in front of them. Zoom in and out using the mouse wheel. When you see something interesting, click on the exhibit hotspot. Next, you are presented with a pop-up that will show you a mix of text and video clips, a 3D model, and links for further reading.
For example, we walked near the Chip Design exhibition. As we have already hovered over the mouse pointer, a video play icon has appeared on this section. Clicking on it will display a four-minute video and two short paragraphs of text on the topic of bullet design. Intel’s vaunted peek inside its chip-making factory is just a pop-up video.
Overall, the Virtual Museum experience is a little underwhelming, given that Intel is extremely rich and up to date with PC technology. The experience is probably too much like a “multimedia CD-ROM” to be applauded in 2022. There’s some consolation that after experiencing the virtual museum, you haven’t spent any gas money on drive there and then felt the urge to buy an expensive water bottle made in China with a souvenir Intel logo on it.
As of this writing, the Intel Bricks and Mortar Museum in Santa Clara is “temporarily closed.” If you are in the area and planning to pass, please check before adding the museum to your itinerary.