Intel has announced that its virtual museum experience is now ready for visitors. The museum charts 50+ years of Intel history, and you can experience it all 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 you wander around the virtual museum space and take a peek inside its chip manufacturing fab. That 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 exertion, the embedded Tweet contains a one-minute video clip encapsulating the experience. If you see anything that interests you, it is only a mouse click to explore further.
Rather than create a bespoke virtual museum experience, Intel got the Google Street View maps team to walk around the bricks-and-mortar Santa Clara museum. To this map, the wandering experience has added various hotspots over exhibits.
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 of interest, click on the exhibit hotspot. Then you are presented with a popup that will show you a mix of text and video clips, a 3D model, and links for further reading.
For example, we have walked around near the Chip Design exhibit. As we have hovered the mouse pointer already, a video play icon has appeared over this section. Clicking this popped up a four-minute video and two short paragraphs of text on the topic of Chip Design. Intel's vaunted peek inside its chip manufacturing fab is just a pop-up video.
Overall the virtual museum experience is a bit of a disappointment, considering Intel is mega-rich and at the forefront of PC technology. The experience is probably too much like a 'multimedia CD-ROM' to be applauded in 2022. There is some consolation that having experienced the virtual museum, you haven't spent money on petrol to get there and then felt like you needed to buy an expensive made-in-China water bottle with an Intel logo souvenir.
At the time of writing, the bricks-and-mortar Intel Museum in Santa Clara is 'temporarily closed.' If you're in the area and thinking of dropping by, please check before adding the museum to your itinerary.
