For Matt Prosser, the digital managing editor at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, virtual reality provides an excellent way for the institution to enhance audiences’ understanding of its objects.
“The NHM has a huge collection of fascinating specimens,” he says. “But many of them are dried, pickled, or fossilised. There’s quite a gap between viewing preserved specimens and collections, and understanding and appreciating the relevance of these objects.
“Virtual reality offers quite a big opportunity to engage audiences in a new and more exciting way.”
The museum has shown two major virtual-reality experiences on site in its Attenborough Studio, both using Samsung Gear headsets and narrated by naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough.
The first of these was First Life in 2015. This ticketed experience transported people back to the Cambrian period, when an intense burst of evolution occurred.
“It was quite an experimental production and we weren’t really sure what the reaction from visitors would be, but it was well received.” Prosser says. “It succeeded commercially by generating income too.”
Later that year the museum launched Great Barrier Reef Dive, which used the same format to explore the biodiversity and health of the coral reef.
These experiences, which were both produced by Alchemy VR, a division of Atlantic Productions, have since been shown at other museums around the world. The company also created an experience that opened in March for the Science Museum, recreating British astronaut Tim Peake’s descent to earth from the International Space Station.
Emily Smith, the director of marketing and business development at Atlantic, says that the company works in different ways with museum partners.
“Sometimes we are commissioned to create bespoke experiences related to a particular object,” she says. “Other times we create content on our own initiative – but we’ll always be speaking with our museum partners about how we are developing the stories and narratives to make sure that they might be of interest.”
Smith says that Atlantic’s experience of producing conventional television documentaries helps it maintain accuracy when developing virtual-reality content for museums. When recreating Peake’s descent, the team visited a capsule in the Netherlands of the same type as the one used by the astronaut to take measurements and photographs. And they fact-checked content with experts from the museum and space agencies, as well as Peake himself.
“Accuracy is fundamental to having a viable museum experience,” Smith says.
While the NHM’s on-site virtual-reality experiments have been successful, Prosser says that its emphasis is now shifting towards providing experiences that can be accessed on people’s own devices.
“We’re not sure that virtual reality is best experienced in a museum,” he says. “As consumer adoption of headsets increases, we’re keen to explore experiences that can be enjoyed in the comfort of the home.”
Last year, the NHM worked with Google Arts and Culture as part of a wider international natural history project to create a virtual-reality experience that featured a Rhomaleosaurus specimen, the biggest in the museum’s fossil marine reptile gallery.
Prosser says that the 360-degree YouTube video, designed to be experienced on Google Cardboard, is “one of our most successful pieces of content ever”. Since being published in September 2016, it has been viewed more than 380,000 times.
“We walk past this specimen every day, but having it brought to life in this way really does hammer home what this creature would have been like, and the significance of its place in the food chain as a top predator,” he says.
The content also carries a conservation message, by highlighting how quickly the Rhomaleosaurus became extinct and drawing a comparison with modern-day sharks.
The production process, which took about two months, involved the museum’s dinosaur biology team working with other experts (including those specialising in sound, computer-generated imagery and laser scanning) from Google and other partners.
“It was a real collaboration between designers, artists and scientists to recreate everything, from the skin texture, to the colour of the eyes and the sound that the creature would have made,” Prosser says.
Ensuring the scripts that accompany these virtual-reality experiences don’t deviate from scientific accuracy is one of the biggest challenges the museum has faced: “In some cases, there are only one or two subject experts, and there are big demands on their time.”
Prosser says that the central aim of off-site virtual-reality experiences such as the Rhomaleosaurus video is not to encourage physical visits to the museum: “We are already a well-attended museum. The objective was to reach out to audiences that may never visit in person, and inspire an understanding of the natural world.”
The museum plans to expand its work in off-site virtual reality and recently announced a new project called Hold the World, a collaboration with Sky, Attenborough and the immersive content studio Factory 42. The experience promises to enable participants to “virtually handle fossils and other precious specimens from the museum’s collection”.
It will be accessible on a variety of platforms, from smartphone-based setups to high-end kit. “We’re keen not to be device-specific,” Prosser says. “We’d like our content to be as widely available as possible.”
He believes that virtual reality has the potential to attract new audiences, but stresses that engagement should be based on the content itself, rather than the appeal of a “technology-based gimmick”.
“Sometimes it’s easy to fall into the trap of relying on the format,” he says. “But for us it’s all about what the content can provide that goes above and beyond existing experiences.”
Virtual reality will be discussed at Museum Tech 2017: A Digital Festival for Museums on 29 June at the Museum of London
Link
Museum Tech 2017: A Digital Festival for Museums