Virtual Reality in Museums: Exploring the Experiences of Museum Professionals

Abstract

The past few years have seen an increase in the use of virtual reality (VR) in museum environments in an attempt for museums to embrace technological innovations and adapt to the challenges of the digital era. While there are studies that examine the advantages of VR in museums and visitors’ experiences with it, there are no studies examining the experiences of museum professionals who are responsible for a museum’s objects and narratives. The aim of this paper is to explore the practices, experiences, and perceptions of museum professionals on the use of VR technology in museums, their perceived advantages and challenges of such technologies, and their vision for the future of technology in museums. The paper provides an in-depth analysis of interviews with museum professionals from a number of countries around the world who worked with particular VR projects in their own institutions. The ultimate aim is to offer a more critical and holistic examination and assessment of the use of VR in museums and provide suggestions for designing and developing VR projects in the future.

Digital Technologies for the Sustainable Development of the Accessible Underwater Cultural Heritage Sites

“…The virtual diving application has been designed and developed to engage users to explore all the underwater archaeological sites' scenarios, which are dynamically loaded in runtime from a single application. The software is implemented by means of the cross-platform game engine Unity [13]. Its architecture is composed of five main elements: a database, a web service, a scene editor module, an interaction module and the controller.…”

“…The Underwater Museums have been designed to offer the users an experience as complete and educative as the one they can have at a "dry" and on-land museum. To encourage the visits at the sites and attract recreational divers, an Augmented Diving system [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][26][27][28]47,48], consisted by an underwater tablet and a localization system has been developed, to localize divers and guide them during the dive (detailed in Section 5). For each pilot site, a specific path has been designed that shows all the Points of Interest (POIs) located in the UM.…”

Virtual Reality System and Scientific Visualisation for Smart Designing and Evaluating of Lighting

“…It is used in medicine as a method for improving the doctors' qualifications in performing any surgeries [30], in rehabilitation [31], in psychology [32], and psychiatry [33] in treating phobias [34], fear or anxiety, dizziness, and balance. Marketing and tourism [35,36] are also very popular VR application areas. The expansion of this technology with the so-called augmented reality offers a large number of chances to teach foreign languages and conduct training courses online, for example, for technicians servicing all devices.…”

Empowering Museum Experiences Applying Gamification Techniques Based on Linked Data and Smart Objects

“…This method of increasing visitor engagement encourages the use of different technologies and approaches. For instance, virtual reality in the cultural heritage domain is gaining popularity, in museums [11,12] and also to augment monuments [13]. In addition, an example of a more physical approach to engage visitors relies on the use of 3d printed replicas that visitors can touch and interact with [14,15].…”