We have some great museums in San Jose, but I think it's time to bring something new into the mix. Museums aren't just a source of education, they're magnets for tourism--especially if you have a large concentration of them close by. Even in today's economy, if we can bring something new, interesting, and cost effective to the table it should have every chance at success. Here are some ideas I've been tossing around in my head for fun:
- Video Game Museum - Chronicling the past 40 years of video game history: consoles, mobile devices, arcades, and computer games. The best part about a museum like this would be interactivity. You could sit down and play games from each era. I'm sure something like this would be a hit in San Jose.
- Virtual Reality Fine Art Museum - Imagine a museum that could change every day, or perhaps even every hour. With high definition monitors and projectors, it would not be very difficult to digitally recreate parts of any museum in the world. Imagine walking into a wing of the Louvre one day and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art the next.
- Entrepreneurship Museum - There are so many interesting Silicon Valley entrepreneurship stories worth documenting in a museum: Steve Jobs (Apple), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Will Hewlett and Dave Packard (HP), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Meg Whitman (eBay), and many, many more.
- Vietnamese History Museum - There are over 100,000 people of Vietnamese ethnicity in San Jose, there's no better place for it in the US.
What type of new museums would you like to have in San Jose?
