A guided 3D Leonardo da Vinci museum, built in code
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Hello HN,I am the founder of a small nonprofit which built Museum of Ages. We opened its first wing last week, a digital Leonardo da Vinci museum. It is a virtual tour with 17 stops, his works and then his last house in Amboise. The entrance is free.At the different stops you can see for example his paintings close to their real size, or 15 of his machines rebuilt in code, and you can have a look at 29 of his anatomy sheets. We also selected 207 of his manuscript pages which you can read in a virtual reading table, mirror the view to read his writing and 131 of the 207 are translated. We also rebuilt his last house in Amboise on the later stops of the walk. The museum is available in seven languages.Each stop has one of four grades as a label, documented, reconstructed, conjectural and not known. In a detailed view the user can have a closer look at the sources.The materials of the rooms and machines are created in Three.js. The museum runs with WebGPU. If the browser doesn’t support it, the fallback is WebGL2. To create the textures we used Creative Commons Zero photo scans (CC0) and for a few small objects we use free 3D models (CC0).Our mission is to create digital museums you can walk as not everyone can get to a museum, because illness or disability keeps them away. Some cannot afford the trip or just reside far away. So our goal is also to make our digital museums as accessible as possible. Therefore we also pre-rendered the walk so that it also works on older phones and is easy to use for older people.We released the code under AGPL-3.0. The texts and pictures are CC BY-SA 4.0. Reproductions have their own licenses. https://github.com/chipmates/museumofagesWe put a lot of time and passion into the museum and hope you like it. We are happy about any feedback. Which digital museum would you like to see next?
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HN · launched Oct 14, 2026 · 90 upvotes (top 12%)
- Education
- Vertical SaaS
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Similar launches
See all 94 similar launches →Could you build this?
Partial The web virtual-tour framework is standard three.js-style code that vibe coding can produce, but the museum's value rests on accurate 3D reconstructions, art assets, and historically vetted content that require specialist 3D artists and historians.
What it would actually take: The stack is a web 3D engine (three.js or similar) with a stop-based guided-walk engine, asset pipeline for compressed textures and stills, and a CDN for media. The hard parts are producing high-fidelity 3D models of historical places and objects and curating scholarly-accurate narration and content. That requires 3D modeling and art-history expertise plus a content team or nonprofit funding.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Wellcome Collection
Concerns raised: Lack of clear value proposition and public demand, Skeuomorphic 3D virtual spaces feel outdated, Confusing and unresponsive navigation controls, Pre-rendered guided camera restricts free exploration, Switching to 2D breaks immersion
Feature requests: Free-roam movement instead of animated camera, Stop button during guided walk, VR support, Direct one-click navigation to sections, Better LLM translation/transcreation
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 94 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #17 of 95 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 330 days after the earliest competitor.
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