How can museums move from being passive recipients of immersive technology to confident, creative leaders in its development? And what support exists for institutions that want to harness mixed reality not just as a visitor attraction but as a genuine tool for social impact?
These questions sit at the heart of Immersive Mixed Reality for Social Impact, a research and practice initiative developed at Brunel University of London in collaboration with partners in the UK and US.
The project has now published a freely available Design and Development Framework and Toolkit, accessible at the project's website, designed to support museums, heritage organisations, and creative technologists in building immersive experiences with purpose.
What the toolkit offers
Mixed reality, which blends digital content with the physical world in real time, is increasingly present in museum and heritage contexts. Yet institutions often find themselves uncertain about how to enter this space: how to scope a project; how to brief and work alongside technical partners; and how to ensure that the experience produced reflects their collections, communities and values rather than simply what a technology provider makes easiest.
The MxR4Impact toolkit addresses this gap directly. Rather than a technical manual, it is a design and development framework that, alongside other stakeholders, gives museum professionals the language, structure and confidence to lead mixed reality projects from the inside.
Advertisement
It maps out a full project lifecycle from initial concept and stakeholder engagement through to design, development and evaluation, and at each stage offers tools and prompts that help museum teams articulate their vision, ask the right questions of technical collaborators and share creative ownership of the process.
The framework introduces the concept of the "world as a stage": a design philosophy that treats immersive experience as live, participatory and spatially situated practice rather than a technical product.
This keeps the focus on storytelling and visitor experience, areas where museums already have deep expertise, rather than on the technology itself.
The challenge of interdisciplinary collaboration
One of the most significant insights to emerge from the research is how difficult, and how necessary, genuine interdisciplinary collaboration is in this field. Bringing together museum curators, community partners, interaction designers, software developers, spatial computing specialists and performers requires not just coordination but a shared vocabulary and mutual respect for different forms of knowledge.
Too often, mixed reality projects in heritage settings are led by technologists, with museums in a commissioning role that limits their creative and intellectual contribution.
Advertisement
The toolkit is designed to change that dynamic – equipping museum professionals to engage as equal partners in the design process and to bring their curatorial, educational and community expertise to bear at every stage.
Learning from practice: Jin's Dream and Sancho's Journey
The framework emerges directly from two mixed reality heritage performances: Jin's Dream and Sancho's Journey were developed and tested at heritage sites in the UK and the US. Both productions fused smart AR glasses with live theatre, creating story-driven participatory experiences for small groups of visitors.
Their themes addressed social impact goals, focusing on decolonising museum narratives by foregrounding difficult histories of the 18th century transatlantic slave trade. Decolonisation is one compelling example of how mixed reality can open new conversations around collections and community.
Mariza Dima is a reader (associate professor) in games design at Brunel University of London. The Design and Development Framework is available to download as a PDF, and an interactive version is accessible via Miro.
To support institutions taking their first steps into this space, a free workshop is available to accompany the toolkit. Designed for museum and heritage teams who wish to explore the mixed reality dimension of the framework in depth, the session offers a two-hour guided, practical introduction to mixed reality experience design in a heritage context. Institutions interested in taking up this offer are encouraged to get in touch with Mariza.