Ancient Journey VR - VR Voyaging

It is the first museum in the world from where you can set out for a trip to ancient times.
It’s the only occasion to admire ancient buildings, search through Egyptian temples,
see under your eyes the beauty of Japan and feel the atmosphere of ancient temple in India.
From the product description

About the Experience

There are so many great 3D scanned artifacts available on Sketchfab and other sites. It’s an amazing aspect of modern technology that we can view these scans from any angle. It’s impressive zooming and rotating models on flat screens but being able to view them in VR lets us get a sense of their true scale. Unfortunately, Sketchfab only lets you view one model at a time, and if you’re using the Meta Browser app, you can’t teleport to see different angles or modify the scale (many models don’t have the right scale set). Creating a museum/gallery experience to view the models in a more natural setting makes for a much nicer experience. This is what Ancient Journey VR sets out to do.

In addition to the museum layout, the app also creates custom environments for the different parts of the world. You can view Japanese, Egyptian, and other places. They are mostly architecture and scenery (not many models here), but they are interesting at quick glance. Unfortunately, the scale of the buildings doesn’t seem quite right, and the general graphics quality is like an old video game. There are lots of problems with objects cutting through each other and holes or openings where things should come together. It’s definitely not high quality.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics within the museum setting are pretty nice. The artifacts are all professional scans. I would guess that they actually originated from Sketchfab and other online sources rather than being scanned for the app. The museum itself is probably a ready-to-use model as are the models in the environments. There’s nothing wrong with doing this. Putting it all together into an easy-to-use experience with nice lighting and controls is worth something, but it’s priced like a custom experience which I’m sure it isn’t.

Information Content

The big downside of this app is the small amount of information. These are famous artifacts with rich histories, but they are essentially used as props to set around the rooms. You can view them from different angles at the right scale, but there are minimal details on information cards in front of them.

As you enter the museum, you are welcomed by a voice telling you about the app. As you enter each environment (not room), you will hear spoken information about the culture you are “visiting.” It doesn’t provide many details, but it’s something I suppose. There’s also no subtitles or language choice (English only)

Navigation and Interactivity

None of the models are interactive. I wouldn’t expect much interactivity, except it might be nice to be able to pick up smaller objects to manipulate them in your hands. You can walk or teleport around the museum, then click to jump between the museum and custom locations.

As far as I can tell, the only way to return to the museum from an environment essentially restarts the app. That means, back to the starting point (by the doors) and the opening narration starts over every time. Not cool!

Updates and Support

none

Summary

As a way to view models of ancient artifacts, Ancient Journey VR works well enough. The different rooms with 3D models in them are easy to browse and feel like being in a real museum. The themed environments are a nice touch, but their low quality essentially cancels out the value. At time of review, the app costs $25 which is completely unrealistic. Wait to get it on sale for under $5 and it’s not bad.