Private tour: a real-time simulation lets museum visitors see an art collection as its collectors once did. (Multimedia).

Few of us have been fortunate enough to view a painting by a renowned artist within a personal setting. Instead, we've had to gaze at the piece from afar as it hangs on a plain museum wall. Now, thanks to efforts by the Imaging Research Center (IRC) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and The Baltimore Museum of Art, the public is able to get a virtual look at how famous works were incorporated into the everyday lives of two local patrons, Etta and Claribel Cone. Through a real-time simulation, viewers can walk the corridors and enter the rooms of the women's apartments as they looked in the early 1900s, and see their art, just as the sisters did on a ...