Museum of Ages opens free 3D Leonardo da Vinci wing, built in code

Museum of Ages, a digital museum run by a German nonprofit, has opened a guided 3D wing about Leonardo da Vinci. It runs as a website on phone or desktop, with free entry and no account.

The wing is set at Clos Lucé in Amboise, Leonardo's last home, on 10 October 1517. The museum says that day is documented: Antonio de Beatis, secretary to Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona, wrote it down in his diary. The hour of the visit is the museum's own choice.

Visitors move through the wing in 17 stops, shown through a film made with the museum's own software. The museum counts about 75 works you can step up to. These are 25 pictures shown close to their real size, 15 machines, 29 anatomy sheets and his notebooks.

The museum says everything on show is one of three things: a reproduction, a reconstruction, or a place the museum designed itself. The label says which. Paintings, drawings and notebook pages are digital copies of public domain works, each with its holder, source and licence line. The original Last Supper is a wall painting in Milan. The wing shows a reproduction of it on a wall in a court.

The house and the machines are built in code. The museum says they follow Leonardo's sheets, plans and photographs of the house, and old accounts, as far as those sources go. The furniture is of the period, but none of it was his. The halls and courts around the house are the museum's own design. Nine machines stand in the mechanism hall, including the aerial screw, a flywheel and a gun with three rows of barrels. Each can be set in motion and seen beside the sheet it comes from.

The museum also labels how sure it is of each statement. There are four grades: documented, reconstructed, conjectural and not known. Documented means a source from the time says it. Reconstructed means it was worked out from what the sources give. Conjectural is a reasoned guess. Not known means nobody knows, and the museum leaves the gap open.

The wing ends in a grave court at night. The museum says the stars are worked out from a star catalogue for the evening of 10 October 1517, at nine o'clock, an hour it chose. It adds that the sunset shows a usual October evening, not that one, and that the shooting star is its own addition.

On the text, the museum says a person reads, corrects and approves every English and German text before it is published. The drafts are written with AI from a research file that names a source for every fact. Other languages are translated with AI and are marked as such. The museum says it has no sound or spoken words yet and has not yet been tested with a screen reader. It aims at the WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standard.

Museum of Ages is a project of ChipMates gemeinnützige GmbH, a nonprofit in Freiburg, Germany. The museum says it is independent, has no partnership with any museum, carries no ads and sets no tracking cookies. Michael Strasser is named as the person responsible for the content. The code is open source under AGPL-3.0 or later. The museum's own texts and stills of what it built are under CC BY-SA 4.0, with some exceptions such as films and stills showing paintings.

The museum says it does not replace a visit to the originals. It lists the museums, libraries and collections that hold them, and says it is glad when a walk ends in front of the real thing.