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Virtual geographic environments are established and still emerging in various fields of science, including geography and cartography (Çöltekin et al., 2020). The potential usage of geographic data within such an environment includes generating digital twins (Batty, 2018), which can be used for simulations of situations that are unable or hard to perform in a real environment. This advantage can be crucial for Crisis Management in performing emergency evacuation (Stachoň et al., 2023), evaluating navigation systems, etc. As build-up areas and individual buildings are becoming increasingly complex, there is an increasing demand for assisting humans in navigation and other tasks in such environments. One of the possible navigation systems is emergency evacuation signs and indoor navigation maps/plans. It is still unclear if current map design principles are fully transferable to indoor maps (Griffin, White, et al., 2017), or what methods of map interactions might best support uses of maps in such contexts (Nossum, 2013) as well as what field methods can be used to study these map uses in ecologically valid ways (Roth et al., 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general argument for creating and using virtual environments over real environments is that the building process of virtual environments is less expensive and not constrained by physics & location. Furthermore, virtual environments need not be antagonistic to their real counterparts - in fact, they can serve as complementaries. One such example involves virtual museums. If the subjects to be displayed are digitized properly, they can be shown in the digital form; this may provide accessibility to those geographically distant from the real museum, or as a means to propel tourism and renown of the real museum destination. Virtual cartographic museum can be thought of as a specific type of a virtual museum, given the subject of the exhibit. Critically, one needs to raise the question: what constitutes a (virtual) cartographic museum? In narrow terms, this can be understood as an exhibit of old maps and the mapping process from a specific period or place; in broader terms, it is made of everything related - i.e., every historical event and reality that contributed to the change and development of a predefined geographic area or a subject that is the interest of one's focus. As per 2021, the technology to create virtual cartographic museums (e.g., virtual reality, programmable 3D engines, advanced forms of human-computer interaction) is readily available, and the scope of this submission is to utilize this and to describe the ways to create such a museum. This is accompanied with concrete examples of a low-cost virtual cartographic museum we built: a set of industrial buildings composed of premade 3D objects that tie in together to a museum environment; the structure, logic, and navigation of the environment; the historic cartographic map sources, that have been adjusted for a virtual presentation; the accompanying texts and interactive elements; and finally, the controls that allow for satisfying user experience while exploring the museum. The example virtual museum was built using free software: Unity engine and its freely available assets. The accessibility aspect of this is also of note, as the end-product application created in the Unity engine can target various platforms - be it VR headsets, PC, mobile, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]