Virtual Museums: The Future is Here.
How technology can help take art and culture closer to people, and help reinvigorate museums in the process.
In the last decade, the larger museums in Europe focused solely on the growing stream of international tourists. They were always busy planning the next big blockbuster exhibitions, building extensions to their edifices, offering swanky new restaurants or setting up additional shops selling souvenirs. Undoubtedly, the focus on physical infrastructure was all aimed at garnering a greater share of the tourist spends. Investments in technology was largely limited to digitisation for archival of the collection. Visitor driven applications usually meant the basic audio guide and a rare information touch screen kiosk. What this tourist boom also hid was the relative absence of local visitors in a museum, and especially the younger generation of Millennials and Generation Z. Local visitors tended to be either schoolchildren on group visits or the elderly. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic and disrupted everything. Prolonged lockdowns meant enforced periods of museum closures. The wider impact has been a near full stop to international travel and tourism. Even when museums have been open, social distancing rules have severely limited the number of visitors allowed. If people cannot visit museums and may not be able to do so for a while, how can the culture sector take the museums to the people? Virtual Museums may provide the answer to that.
So, what do we mean by a virtual museum? Being an emerging concept, there is no one established definition. It can be a purely virtual or a hybrid format. It may or may not use Virtual Reality (VR). In its most ideal form, it would involve experiencing an object or a setting through a VR Headset using an app. What makes VR really immersive is that it is a digitally created environment that enables a hyper-realistic experience while also allowing interactivity. This can be experienced at home or anywhere with one’s smartphone and internet access. A more immediately achievable option is a hybrid version. Herein a virtual experience is recreated in a public space through projection of high resolution 2D images or 3D Holograms that tries to recreate or adapt the original experience of the physical object in the original setting in the museum. Alternatively, at the most basic level, it can be access to a museum’s collection through images in a website or an app, either the museum’s own or an aggregator platform — something most of us are likely to have experienced since the onset of the pandemic. Also, such a visit may include experiences like virtual guided tours with the curator, artist or a subject matter expert.
Kremer Museum, founded in 2017, is a purely virtual museum that houses 17th century Dutch and Flemish old master paintings belonging to George and Ilone Kremer and brings the collection to life using Virtual Reality. Since the paintings one experiences in VR are very high-resolution 3D renderings created using many photographs, it is possible to appreciate them at a fine level of brushstroke detail as well as the colour and texture. VR allows the visitors to have an immersive experience that goes beyond what it is possible in a physical visit. You can for example, look at the back of the panel and examine the stamps of provenance, something unimaginable in a physical visit. You can spend as much time as you want, and not feel pushed around by crowd of visitors or feel view blocked by tourists lining up to take selfies. Since it works through an app and a headset, it can be ‘visited’ from anywhere in the world redefining what ‘accessibility’ to a museum can mean when enabled by technology. The museum also runs a ‘Mighty Master’ program, which allows schoolchildren to experience the collection and offers a promising way of getting the young generation interested in art and culture.
The bigger museums have only recently started including virtual experiences into their blockbuster exhibitions, often driven more by constraints than a motivation to innovate. The Louvre as part of the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition in 2019 created a Mona Lisa VR experience to avoid the prospect of having to move their star attraction from its permanent display location. Tate Modern in London as part of their Modigliani retrospective in 2018 created a VR experience which allowed visitors a peek into his atelier where he spent the final year of his life. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London plans to create a VR experience as part of the upcoming Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition in 2021 to allow visitors to have a more immersive experience of her ‘Wonderland’. These experiences like the Mona Lisa VR for example is now accessible across VR platforms on iOS and Android from anywhere. However, these museums have approached VR only as an innovative addition to their temporary exhibitions till now, which has limited the possibilities.
When the work of art or object cannot be transported because they are too heavy, fragile or valuable, virtual recreations are the only way out. Take the mural of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, medieval Chinese Calligraphies or Egyptian statues or mummies for example. VR also helps elevate the physical visit by recreating environments which now exist only partially or have been completely lost. The guided visit to Domus Aurea in Rome has recently added a wonderful VR experience that recreates the architectural elements and the decorative frescoes of Nero’s legendary palace in situ. This allows the visitors to become aware about their original manifestation and glory which they cannot ever imagine merely looking at the ruins.
Museums in the west also have the responsibility to enable virtual access because of their colonial legacy. The British Museum, Louvre and the Musee du Quai Branly among others, have a significant number of objects in their permanent collection that were acquired during the period of colonial conquest through means which would be considered as unethical and unlawful by modern standards. The issue of their repatriation to the countries of origin still remains unresolved. The museums must take the first step towards reconciliation by creating virtual experiences which allow people of the country of origin to experience their own cultural artefacts. But it doesn’t need to stop at that. Western Museums can also use this as an opportunity to open another platform for cultural exchange. What the Instituto Italiano di Cultura or the Alliance Francaise across its centres promotes in the realm of language, art and culture — virtual museums can help build on that. They can be an important means of cultural diplomacy in the future. The second ethical factor is related to sustainability. An unchecked growth in tourism has left an unsustainable carbon footprint. Cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam have already faced a backlash from locals and have been working towards regulated tourist inflows. Most larger museums will soon face plateauing of tourist flows at some point and even loaning out works to other places leaves a carbon footprint. Allowing visitors quality access remotely is the only solution to exponentially growing visitors in the long term.
Governments need to take the lead in facilitating the creation of virtual museums. In 2019, the French culture minister Frank Riester had announced plans to create within three years around 1000 smaller digital museums in France called Micro-Folies which would make accessible high-resolution digital copies of masterpieces from museums like the Louvre, Musee D’Orsay and Centre Pompidou across the country. Wider partnerships like the G20 or EU coupled with cultural organisations like the UNESCO and ICOM can help make such efforts collaborative at an international level. Simultaneously, the cultural industry leaders must shed their antiquated belief that virtual renditions are not authentic experiences and art and cultural objects can only be truly experienced in person. The roadmap for accessibility must not be limited to a Eurocentric or western approach. Virtual Museums can help make Leonardo’s fragile drawings accessible to art lovers in New Delhi, Shanghai or Nairobi. Even in the hybrid format, innovations must be created to make the units mobile which can travel from place to place to maximise access.
To build these virtual environments, forging the right technology collaborations and finding the right vendors is key. For smaller museums, it is a challenge to collaborate with bigger names in the industry or fund such projects independently. It is their interest to first form a cohort with other museums and then work with aggregators where resources and know-how can be shared through cooperation. Among tech majors, Google Arts & Culture has established partnerships with more than two thousand museums from across the world to make their collections accessible online. Microsoft is committed to Mixed Reality (MR) projects with its Hololens hardware. While MR works with a headset, it does deviate from the purely virtual domain by overlaying the simulation in a real physical setting. HTC Vive Arts, the Taiwanese smartphone maker has taken the lead in VR initiatives having established project-based tie-ups with the Louvre, Tate and the V&A. Samsung has a tie-up with the British Museum through which they provide virtual access of the museum’s collection to schoolchildren in the UK in their classrooms.
In conclusion, virtual museums have immense potential to be a game changer by making the collections accessible and relevant across all age groups and geographies while opening up new revenue streams as well. For children, they enable gamification of education which can improve learning outcomes. For the digitally native Generation Z who thrive on multi-sensorial experiences, they can heighten engagement. For the elderly who are unable to visit museums physically, they can be the only way to access. Even if tourism bounces back, only a small fraction of people from developing countries actually will travel to the west. Virtual Museums can create a cost-effective yet engaging point of access for them. The relevance and power of virtual museums will therefore certainly outlast the Covid-19 pandemic. If anything, the pandemic will only serve as the catalyst. As more and more people get used to experiencing art and culture online, acceptance of virtual platforms will grow. In the coming years, as the hardware like VR and MR Headsets become less expensive, consumer adoption will grow exponentially. The advent of 5G networks along with upgrades in processing power of mobile phones will also usher in much faster speeds and allow richer and seamless data flow back and forth from the cloud. A combination of these factors will make such projects both scalable and monetizable, enabling museums to pursue them more effectively. But to do that, museums must first build leadership teams who are actually able to envision digital strategies, educate their curators to the storytelling enhancing possibilities using technology and proactively pursue collaborations that help build the ecosystem required to make virtual museums a reality.
The article was published in Italian in Rome based art foundation Fondazione Ducci’s art magazine. You can read the same here: https://www.artefondazioneducci.com/post/musei-virtuali-il-futuro-è-già-qui
