Time travel as a visitor experience : a virtual reality exhibit template for historical exploration
Abstract
Developments in digital infrastructures and expanding digital literacies lower barriers for museums and visitor centres to provide new interactive experiences with their collections and heritage. With virtual reality more accessible, heritage institutions are eager to find out how this technology can create new methods in interpretation, learning and visualisation. This paper reviews a virtual reality framework implemented into exhibits in three cultural heritage centres. By taking advantage of existing visitor digital literacies, the exhibits provided accessible immersive exploratory experiences for inter-generational audiences. The digital framework developed is a template for virtual reality content interaction that is both intuitive and powerful. The exhibits include digital reconstructions of physical scenes using game engines for a convincing visual experience. We contextualise the logic behind a virtual reality setup for the separate institutions, how they assisted with the narrative as well as if an immersive digital environment provided a more profound response in users. Our aim is to communicate approaches, methodologies and content used to overcome the challenge of presenting a period in history to a modern audience, while using emergent technology to build connections and disseminate knowledge that is memorable and profound.
Citation
Cassidy , C A , Fabola , A E , Oliver , I A & Miller , A H D 2019 , Time travel as a visitor experience : a virtual reality exhibit template for historical exploration . in D Beck , A Peña-Rios , T Ogle , D Economou , M Mentzelopoulos , L Morgado , C Eckhardt , J Pirker , R Koitz-Hristov , J Richter , C Gütl & M Gardner (eds) , Immersive Learning Research Network : 5th International Conference, iLRN 2019, London, UK, June 23–27, 2019, Proceedings . Communications in Computer and Information Science , vol. 1044 , Springer , Cham , pp. 103-116 , 5th Immersive Learning Research Network Conference (iLRN 2019) , London , United Kingdom , 23/06/19 . https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23089-0_8 conference
Publication
Immersive Learning Research Network
ISSN
1865-0929Type
Conference item
Rights
© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23089-0_8
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