Louvre Museum goes visual with Nintendo 3DS guide

London - The famed Paris museum Louvre is getting modernised by going visual with new electronic guides in a deal with Japan’s Nintendo. 

The Louvre Museum, whose origins date to the 18th century, is used to dealing with antiquities, with nearly all of its thousands of works of art dating back to 1848 or earlier.

The guide provides 3DS game consoles that offer touch-screen, visual-and-audio guidance for visitors who teem the museum’s labyrinthine halls by the millions each year, the Daily Express  reported.

Billed as an unprecedented innovation at a museum, the game consoles launched this week offer 700 recordings on famed works like the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory of Samothrace and  the Mona Lisa - only a tiny sliver of the 35,000-odd works displayed in the museum.

The electronic guides, both navigational and informative, offer virtual glimpses of the artistic touches that are tough for the naked eye to see, like tiny details on towering tableaux on the  museum’s wood-panelled walls.

They will use much of the same information in the Louvre’s now-shelved audio guides.

Pairing France’s highest-of-high-brow museums with a Japanese technology company behind games like Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers and Zelda might not seem like a natural fit.

And some may view the electronic guide as a shop window for Nintendo. But Louvre officials say the museum must change with the times and try to access as wide a public possible.

Over the years the Louvre has drawn controversy with some of its innovations, including the glass-pyramid entrance by Chinese-American architect IM Pei or its sharing parts of its massive  collection with wealthy countries such as the United Arab Emirates - which is to open a Louvre affiliate in 2015.

Above all, the console is meant to reach out to the Louvre’s customer base: the museum welcomed 8.9 million visitors last year - more than half of them under 30, and about two-thirds  foreign.

The guides, for now available in seven languages, cost five euros on top of the museum’s 10-euro standard admission price.