This article is fascinating to me, because it’s really highlighting just how differently people view the appeal of museums. I can’t disagree with anything you say here, but to me, the idea of a VR museum is still massively unappealing because it inherently can’t include the main thing I love about going to a museum, which is the knowledge that the things I’m looking at are real.

For example: I’m a Classics postgrad, and I spend a lot of time looking at pictures of old stuff. There’s one vase painting in particular that I’ve always loved, and is actually going to go on the title page of my thesis; I first saw a picture of it in a textbook four or five years ago, and I must have seen it hundreds of times since. I visited the British Museum last month and was wandering around the Greek galleries, and happened to look into this random glass case full of pottery, and there it was, right there in front of me. Not a picture on a computer screen or in a textbook, but a real, solid, 2500-year old object with the potters’ fingerprints in the clay, right in front of me. I nearly cried. That’s the appeal of museums for me; VR seems very exciting and cool and everything, but if I want to look at a picture of something, I’ve been able to do that since the invention of the camera. Museums, to me, are about the knowledge that what you’re seeing is real.

But that doesn’t make what you’re saying here incorrect! The possibilities of VR are fascinating, and I particularly like the accessibility aspect of it — I would love to take a really good VR tour of the Met, for example, which is just too far away for me to reasonably visit any time soon. But I don’t think it’s going to “break museums”, because for a lot of people like me, the physical reality of the objects is huge aspect of the museum experience that you just can’t replicate with VR.