How can we democratise immersive storytelling for cultural heritage organisations?
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.
Partners involved
The problem
The integration of XR in cultural heritage presents several challenges:
- Customisation Costs: XR experiences in cultural heritage are often custom-built as one-off installations, necessitating substantial investment.
- Asset Availability: Many organisations lack high-quality digital 3D assets, pivotal for creating immersive content.
- Communication Gaps: A notable lack of shared understanding exists between design studios and heritage organisations regarding the affordances and technical possibilities of XR, leading to communication barriers.
- Sustainability: The high production costs associated with XR make it difficult for these technologies to be adopted as part of long-term storytelling strategies within heritage organisations.
The Solution
TransmiXR revolutionises cultural heritage experiences by integrating XR technologies that allow museums and historical sites to transcend traditional boundaries. The solution includes:
- Metadata-Driven Interactive Displays: Utilizing existing artifacts’ metadata to create immersive narratives that allow visitors to explore history in a dynamic, context-rich format.
- Reusable Immersive Storytelling Templates: Streamlining content creation in cultural heritage institutions with customisable templates that can be updated with new content for various exhibitions, drastically reducing the time and resources needed.
- Social XR Environments: Facilitating a participatory experience where remote and local visitors can interact in real-time within the same virtual space, enhancing the educational impact through community-based learning.
- Integrated Workflow Tools: Providing heritage professionals with collaborative platforms for seamlessly integrating XR features into exhibits, ensuring that every piece of content is aligned with institutional goals and visitor expectations.
Target Audience
Designed for cultural heritage organisations, including museums, libraries, and archives. The technology appeals to:
- Museum Curators and Exhibit Designers: Utilize XR to craft engaging exhibits that attract broader audiences and offer immersive educational stories.
- Archivists and Digital Preservation Specialists: Employ XR to create virtual replicas of inaccessible artifacts, widening public access without risking damage.
- Heritage Education Officers and Outreach Coordinators: Integrate XR into educational programs to deliver compelling historical and cultural learning experiences.
- Creative Technologists and Content Creators in Cultural Sectors: Leverage XR for innovative storytelling and exhibition design within cultural settings.
- Independent Artists and Designers: Use TransmiXR’s tools to creatively explore and express historical narratives.
- Curation
- Social XR
- Experience
- Immersive
Cultural Heritage Use Case: Key Milestones
This timeline outlines the essential milestones and stages of growth for the Cultural Heritage Use Case. Dive in to explore the significant steps of The Space Archivists story.
Pre-Pilot
1. Research: defining user requirements
XR plays a big role in sectors like gaming, allowing for immersive experiences. How can cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) benefit from immersive technologies as well? We set out to investigate not only opportunities, but also challenges and barriers that prevent meaningful use of XR within our sector. Through research, we defined the necessary user requirements for inclusive, sustainable, and adaptable use of XR within cultural heritage.
2. Kids Team Research & Design Salons
One of the most important components of our iterative design process is listening to the end users! During research with children from Kidsteam (a child design research group in College Park, Maryland, USA), children at the Mediamuseum (Hilversum, NL), and professional data scientists, we learned how children and adults think about media and metadata.
While metadata has many challenges, the research showed that children understand abstract data grounded in concrete experiences. They are motivated to interact with media through immersive and collaborative contexts, and categorisation games with high-level narrative goals. Our findings helped shape the story and the game play narrative.
3. Drawing up the narrative: The Space Archivists story is born!
When creating an immersive experience, one of the most important elements is the narrative. We set out to write a story allowing for an interactive and participatory experience, making sure the end-users would become part of the story. That’s how The Space Archivists was born.
In a futuristic sci-fi scenario, an archive has been sent to space to preserve the memory of humanity. But the items got all mixed up in a meteorite storm! In 3 games, the player’s task is to fix the archive by putting all media items back in place.
4. Storytelling with metadata: selecting datasets
One of the biggest barriers encountered in the sector is that XR projects often depend on expensive 3D assets. We took a different approach by transforming existing collection metadata into immersive narratives, resulting in a more cost-effective and sustainable way of storytelling. We used datasets ranging from Europeana sports to our own games collection.
5. Low fidelity testing: Cinekid Festival
Before entering the development phase of our pilot, we did lots of low fidelity testing – analogue play testing before the game is made in VR. We asked: Is the narrative interesting for our target audience? Do the initial game mechanics work? Are the datasets engaging? One of the most important low fidelity tests was the one at the Medialab of the Cinekid Festival in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Taking the children’s feedback into account, we went into the development phase with a validated plan.
Pilot phase
6. Prototype 0 – Fall 2024
With the findings from the Kids Team Research, Design Salons and Low Fidelity Testing fresh in mind, development of The Space Archivists began. In the first prototype, the focus was on testing game mechanics and the intuitive use of controls. The prototype was delivered as an initial grey box, meaning there were no designs just yet. Usability testing showed how the controls and mechanics could be improved.
7. Prototype 1 Early Spring 2024
Another milestone, as this prototype included the first designs of the spaceship, allowing testers to experience the environment of the game and first game features.
8. Prototype 2 Late Spring 2024
The third iteration of the prototype included not only all visual designs and 3D assets, but also the sound design. This time, the usability tests were taking place with school children, testing all game elements.
9. Beyond Virtual Museums & Speculative Curatorship
Through every stage of development, we remained focused on our goal: making XR accessible to the sector. To support this, we organized interactive workshops, including Beyond Virtual Museums held at Immersive Tech Week 2024 and a Speculative Curatorship activity for cultural heritage professionals at the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision. These workshops help to foster a community of early adopters eager to experiment with XR in their own practices, spark new discussions on the potential of XR formats in cultural heritage, and contribute to capacity building within the sector.
10. Bringing The Space Archivists alive!
Three times hooray! The social VR game The Space Archivists will be ready to visit in the summer of 2025 at the Media Museum of Sound & Vision. Through open pilot testing in this natural environment, we will further validate our work. In addition, cultural heritage professionals, XR designers, students, and researchers will be invited to come and visit the installation and learn about our process.