Art is a mirror that reflects the culture of a country. For many travelers, visiting art museums can be the highlight of any trip. As host country for the 2020 Olympics, Japan is attracting more and more visitors. Yet only 16% enjoy art during their stay in Japan. But that’s changing now. IJC MUSEUM is a 3D virtual museum created "in the cloud" that is accessible anywhere in the world to allow “firsthand” art experience. Works by leading artists representing Japan’s contemporary art scene — such as Yayoi Kusama, Tabaimo, and Hisashi Tenmyouya — include large sculptures and dismantled installations no longer on display in the real world and difficult to reproduce.

The project began with an architect’s design for a real museum. Creating a “3D museum in the cloud” involved actual building engineering in full scale and texture, capturing the functionality of exhibition spaces.

To reproduce artwork by seven leading Japanese artists in 3D virtual space, sculptures were digitalized using a 3D scanner, enhanced with super high-precision texture data captured through high-resolution photography. 2D artworks can be magnified, allowing visitors to view greater detail than with human vision. The virtual museum shows movies of the artists at work or speaking about their work, so visitors can experience art appreciation only available with digitalized exhibition.

WebGL enables overwhelming 3D reproduction. Visitors can move freely inside the museum and see artworks in 360-degree panorama, just like being there. Photography can be prohibited in most museums in Japan, but here, visitors can freely take photographs of any work or post them on social networks.

Since the virtual museum shows movies of artists at work or talking about their work, visitors can enjoy digital art appreciation.If you think only real art is fun, visit the “Art Trip” room to find really cool Japanese art museums. It’s an art guide for visitors to Japan.

Our project “innovation of the art experience” has attracted worldwide attention, and in the 10-day period after the launch, IJC MUSEUM was featured in more than 600 articles in 60 countries, and shared in 5000 posts on social networks. Online, there were more than 10 million “IMPs”, making it one of the most popular museums in Japan.

Japan Tourism Agency announced that the number of incoming visitors to Japan in the month of February 2016 reached 1,891,400, showing a year-on-year increase of 36.4%. At this very moment, many international tourists are visiting art museums in Japan.