Originally launched in 2017, Tencent built a mobile museum via WeChat mini-program. According to the company, it’s worked with 23 museums, galleries and art institutions so far, and is expanding to the overseas museums, such as the Guimet Museum in Paris, France, which is home to one of the largest collections of Asian art outside of Asia.
Features: The home page features a list of museums, many of which are in China — Chinese Aviation Museum (134 visitors), China’s Science and Technology Museum (3,556) — and some overseas ones, e.g., Brazil’s National Museum (3,564) and Musée Guimet in Paris (202,883). Some museums have an audio feature; some others do not. The mini-program also shows how many people have visited the museums, what people are talking about the exhibitions. And finally, we loved the mini-program’s art identification feature, where a visitor snaps a photo of an artwork and the mini-program identifies the name of the artwork in Chinese along with some relevant facts on the piece.
Our Take: We liked Tencent’s effort, but it seems like the database of exhibitions/artworks needs to be expanded. We tried scanning some artworks and the mini-program only succeeded in identifying them less than half of the time. But since it hasn’t gone mainstream for Chinese visitors yet, we think it has a lot of room to grow.
