Automatic Generation of Coherent Image Galleries in Virtual Reality

With the rapidly increasing size of digitized and born-digital multimedia collections in archives, museums and private collections, manually curating collections becomes a nearly impossible task without disregarding large parts of the collection. In this paper, we propose the use of Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) to automatically generate coherent image galleries that allow intuitive, user-driven exploration of large multimedia collections in virtual reality (VR). We extend the open-source VR museum VIRTUE to support such exhibitions and apply it on different collections using various image features. A successful pilot test took place at the Basel Historical Museum with more than 300 participants.