In the following interview with the “Cultural Heritage” Use Case team, we take a closer look at the “Cultural Heritage” Use Case within the TRANSMIXR project, which is reshaping how audiences interact with and experience cultural heritage. By focusing on creating more interactive and immersive museum experiences, this Use Case is pushing the boundaries of how technology can preserve, share, and bring cultural treasures to life. Through insights from key representatives, we’ll explore the challenges faced, the innovative tools developed, and the progress made in transforming traditional exhibits into dynamic, engaging experiences that resonate with audiences of all ages.
How would you describe the current status of your use case?
The Cultural Heritage sector is versatile, including institutions like archives, libraries and museums. They are known for holding large collections, often without the spatial, financial or practical capacity to exhibit more than a fraction of them. XR technology is a promising tool to step in here and to assist making collections more accessible and tangible. A number of barriers that prevent wide-scale adoption of XR in the sector have been identified, such as the complex multi-stakeholder production process and high costs. Hence, for the Cultural Heritage use case, the goal of TRANSMIXR has been established as follows: to explore how immersive XR experiences could become more scalable for cultural heritage organisations.To explore this goal, the cultural heritage use case team created three concrete concepts for solutions that could be developed. All three concepts share several key characteristics needed to ensure successful implementation within the sector, such as replicability, scalability, gamification, while each one address different users needs and utilises different technological solutions:
- Concept 1: Marketplace for stories – AR-based storytelling format with heritage collections tailored for school groups;
- Concept 2: Augmented exhibitions – enhancing physical exhibitions with an AR-based social game;
- Concept 3: Heart of the archive – a replicable VR-based experience facilitating playful engagement with heritage collections and collecting practices.
After careful evaluation and examination, the use case team decided to move on with developing The Heart of the Archive as a pilot. The pilot consists of three applications: (1) a social XR authoring tool (2) a VR game template and (3) a curator interface allowing the customisation of (2).
- The social XR authoring tool serves the better understanding between clients and producers of XR experience in the pre-production stage. The platform facilitates visualisation and collaboration.
- The VR game template is a VR experience for the end user (e.g. museum visitor), called The Space Archivists. The narrative sets the stage with an end-of-the-earth scenario where humanity has sent an archive into space to preserve its memory and energy patterns. A meteorite disrupts the archive, scattering its contents. Players, acting as a team of space archivists from the future, must save the archive by reordering the displaced artefacts in three chambers. In each chamber, they collaborate to compare a different categorisation task. Upon completing all chambers, the heart of the archive fully lights up, and the complete melody plays, celebrating their achievement.
- The curator interface allows cultural heritage professionals to customise the VR game template to their own needs. They can customise different aspects, such as: the overall narrative, solo/multiplayer option, number of games, metadata categories and type of media. Further customisation will require the involvement of a design studio.
What are the key goals or milestones you’re aiming to achieve in the next 3 months?
The next three months will be defined by developing prototypes for both the end user experience and the curator interface. Our upcoming milestone is March 1st, by then first versions of the curator interface and the end user experience will both be ready. Simultaneously, embracing an iterative design process, we have already started our evaluation activities as well: we are running design salons, prototype testing sessions, a hackathon and in depth research with individual curators. All these activities contribute to us being in tune with professionals and end users and understanding their needs and wishes.
Further, in January we want to launch the Space Archivist as our backdrop narrative and present some first visuals to our audience. In February, we will host a Masterclass for Cultural Heritage Professionals, disseminating our knowledge on immersive storytelling for the sector.
Looking back at your journey, what was the most challenging phase of developing your use case?
The cultural heritage field is diverse, thus coming up with one-size-fits-all solutions is not the way to go. GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) come in many different shapes and sizes, thus understanding our audience was an important milestone for the use case. We have been working iteratively to find the sweet spot between a highly customised and completely templatable experience. Ultimately, we have decided to address three audiences at the same time: Cultural Heritage professionals, XR design studios and end users, in our use case example children who come to play the VR game.
Understanding the needs of cultural heritage professionals has been challenging primarily because of the wide audience; for instance, there are many definitions of what a curator is, and curators have access to different types of museum spaces, different types of datasets, and have different levels of expertise in crafting narratives and working with technology.
In parallel, creating an end-user archival experience for children with metadata in VR was challenging because several factors were unknown; we did not know how children across a diverse age range understood abstract data concepts, or 2D archival materials could meaningfully be represented in VR.
As we revisit this project in the future, what is the one major outcome or achievement you’d like to see for your use case?
It would be great to see the cultural heritage sector adopt our tools (including the curator interface, the reusable storytelling format, etc.) and learning modules. This way, we hope for collections to become more accessible and for the acceptance of immersive experiences in the sector to increase.
