About
What stands in the way of XR adoption in the cultural heritage sector? How might we create meaningful interactions with heritage in immersive environments? This use case, led by the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, aims to tackle these questions by introducing a format for reusable immersive storytelling and social XR-powered workflow for immersive experience production. This will improve communication between design companies and heritage organisations during the creation process and make immersive experiences an attractive and sustainable storytelling format.
The Problem
The use of XR for cultural heritage comes with high entry barriers:
- XR experiences in the sector are primarily custom-built, one-off installations that require significant investments and they often rely on the availability of high-quality digital 3D assets which many organisations lack.
- Lack of shared understanding between design studios and heritage organisations about the affordances and technical possibilities of XR creates communication barriers during the production process.
- High production costs mean that XR experiences do not find a place in the long-term storytelling strategies of a heritage organisation.
The Solution
TRANSMIXR innovates both the immersive storytelling format and its creation process:
- Storytelling with rich collection metadata – Instead of relying on 3D assets as a core storytelling element, TRANSMIXR offers cultural heritage organisations a means to deploy immersive experiences using metadata from their pre-existing resources.
- Reusable immersive storytelling format – data visualisation and interaction templates in XR can be iteratively updated with new data and content. This versatility allows organisations to utilise the same template across multiple projects, covering diverse topics, resulting in cost-effective immersive experiences.
- Social XR production workflow – implementing Social XR into the production workflow streamlines collaboration by improving stakeholders’ comprehension and discussion of creative concepts and technical possibilities. This, in turn, reduces friction during the production of immersive experiences.
Target audiences
Cultural heritage organisations, including museums, libraries and archives. This use case in particular aims to benefit curators involved in the creation of immersive experiences.
Benefits
Empowers the general public to explore collections through a data-driven lens. By offering a new storytelling vector for heritage organisations, the use case creates opportunities to tell different kinds of stories about trends and gaps in collections. The introduction of immersive storytelling templates makes the concept easily scalable as any organisation with digital heritage collections would be able to customise it and reuse it for their needs. Using the logic introduced by TRANSMIXR, new templates could be introduced in the future making this concept very versatile.
Partners involved
