Even though each museum has its own agenda based on its theme and location, there is one crucial element that all museums share: to provide services to the public; as one of the goals in American Alliance of Museums’ 2016-2020 strategic plan is Access: “deliver relevant content and superior user experience” (AAM). This includes finding ways to make museums’ collections as discoverable and accessible as possible to the general public, rather than only for the scholars and researchers. For generations, museums utilized ways such as publishing collection catalogues and creating digital archives in hopes to reach wider audiences. As technologies become more advanced, museums begin to apply them, and one of the technologies that becomes increasingly popular for the museums to employ is Virtual Reality (VR).
However, while researching various VR implementations in the museums, the author finds it difficult to discover them on museum web pages or nearly impossible to access them after discovering them. Therefore, the paper wants to advocate that VR museum tours should be easy to discover and access like collection catalogues and digital archives: they should not be restricted by time and space, rather enable access to the people who cannot attend the exhibitions. To find ways for better implementations, the paper will first examine how VR museum tours can take references from collection catalogues and digital archives; then the paper will use Tate Modern and British Museum’s VR tours’ as examples to weigh their pros and cons to find the best practices.
Before VR implementations, museums already have collection catalogues and digital archives to present their collections online. Collection catalogues or museum catalogues are one of the most imp ortant parts of the museums. Through detailed research and arrangement, museums make their collections available to the public. Museums put in resources and budgets for collection catalogues because they “belong to a well-established genre with a distinguished pedigree, and they have been widely admired for generations for their attention to detail and high-quality production. They are also one of the most important ways that museums share research findings of the works of art in their collections” (Museum Catalogues in the Digital Age). No matter whether the collection catalogues are physical or digital, it is relatively easy for the visitors to access. The physical collection catalogues can usually be purchased in museum stores and are generally categorized by exhibition or artist. For the online collection catalogues, they are usually found under “The Collection” tab on the museum website homepage. They both contain the same information such as title, the name of the artist, dimension, materials, and background information. Some may also offer additional resources and artworks’ display locations. Having that information available and accessible to the public, museums fulfill their mission on being of service to the public. People can easily gain that collection information anytime and anywhere without difficulties.
A step further from the collection catalogues; museums also begin to build digital archives for certain collections that not only note down the artworks, but also categorized and make them more comprehensive by putting in relative information. For example, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles builds a digital archive for its exhibition Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980. Going further than the collection catalogues, the digital archive adds in not only the artworks, but also all aspects of the exhibition, such as detailed artist backgrounds, documentation, and research information. The purpose of the digital archive is to “extends the life of this momentous exhibition, with a gallery of artwork images and the associated didactic label texts from the installation at the Hammer Museum; essays, artist biographies, and a chronology from the Now Dig This! exhibition catalogue; and a variety of other resources meant to encourage further research” (Now Dig This!). People who are interested in the digital archive can easily find more information on the museums’ websites. Just like collection catalogues, there are no time or distance limitations.
No matter whether they are collection catalogues or digital archives, both are easy to discover and access. They are parts of museums’ missions in regard to engagement, and by far, they are successful. VR museum tours follow their footsteps trying to make the visitors’ experiences more vivid. However, currently, it lacks basic discoverability and accessibility. Draw from AAM’s goal for Access, the paper defines discoverability and accessibility in this context as: discoverability refers to how visible online VR tours are for the visitors who try to explore them on museum websites; accessibility refers to after visitors discover the VR tours, how convenient and effortless will it be for people to access them online. By far, VR museum tours still have a long way to go in terms of these two basic principles that are pivotal to the museum missions.
The idea of “Virtual Museum” arrives first in 1947 by French novelist and art theorist André Malraux, he articulates the concept of imaginary museum (le musée imaginaire) “ a museum without walls, location or spatial boundaries, like a virtual museum, with its content and information surrounding the objects, might be made accessible across the planet” (Styliani, 521). The term “Virtual Reality” is then popularized by Jaron Lanier in 1989 (Rubin), who focuses mainly on the technological aspect of VR, such as newly invented special headsets that allow the users to experience imagined situations. After that, a lot of different fields begin to implement VR. In museum fields, there are two main reasons why they utilize VR. For cultural heritage professions, VR is used to recreate part of the cultural heritages that are lost or destroyed as a mean of preservation (McBride, 41-42). Yet my focus will be looking at the VR museum tours that aim to better engage with their visitors. As Sarah Tutton, a senior curator at the ACMI, puts: “...the hope is that VR will become an equal tool in our holistic story-telling and educational toolbox alongside our objects or labels or kiosks, etc, all telling that one story or even enabling entirely new ways of storytelling using those unique traits that VR brings to the table that we can’t do with any other forms at this point in time” (How Can Museums Use Virtual Reality?).
VR museum tour is a new way for museums to present their collections to the public that increases interactions, as Maria Roussou, a scholar in Interactive Systems, believes: “Interactivity is a raison d'être of a virtual reality world” (Roussou, 182). Her thought echoes with Hannah Boulton, the head of press and marketing at the British Museum. She also believes that VR is not a one-way street: “For us, it’s about audience engagement, we don’t want to do it for VR’s sake. What we want to do is to use VR where it can lend that extra context” (Cigainero).
In the following, the paper will examine discoverability and accessibility of three VR museum tour case studies, one from Tate Modern and two from The British Museum respectively. The paper will be looking at the problems surrounding them, include time and location constraint as well as limitations of budget. From there, it will then propose two potential solutions and anticipate their drawbacks.
Located in London, Tate Modern put on a Modigliani exhibit in 2017. As part of the exhibition, the museum creates a VR tour that allows the visitors to take a tour inside Modigliani’s final studio in Paris as a way to familiarize more with the artist’s life and creative inspirations during that period. Tate Modern dedicates a whole web page for its VR tour, including the background of Modigliani’s artworks and the VR creation background. The layout of the website is organized, which is a comprehensive way for the visitors to learn more about the ideas behind the creation of this VR tour and their goals, yet, the fundamental ideas of discoverability and accessibility are missing.
Unlike collection catalogues, which the visitors can easily access through “The Collection” tab on the museum homepage, the VR tour does not exist anywhere on the homepage, unless the visitors specifically type in “virtual reality”. This creates a huge obstacle for the visitors if they do not know Tate Modern develops a VR tour. Secondly, even if the visitors successfully navigate to the VR tour page through keyword search, they can no longer access it because the tour is only available from November 23, 2017 to April 2, 2018. This creates difficulties for the visitors, including time and location constraints. Even if the visitors do visit the museum at that time period, they are being served on a first-come, first-served basis, with an average of 25 minutes waiting time. Moreover, unlike collection catalogues and digital archives that try to promote lasting showcase that allows the visitors to revisit the collections as long and as many times as they need, Tate Modern’s Modigliani VR tour only has the evidence of existence, not the actual tour. People can no longer access it after the time has passed. From this example, the author realizes that even though the museum provides a detailed overview and background on its VR tour, it does not fulfill the basic discoverability and accessibility requirements, thus does not fulfill its public service mission (Modigliani VR: The Ochre Atelier – Behind The Scenes).
Although slightly improved on certain aspects, the British Museum also has problems with discoverability and accessibility in its VR tours. Unlike Tate Modern, the British Museum has been putting on VR tours more than once. In 2015, the museum sets up a VR weekend specifically for the children and families in partnership with Samsung. The theme of the VR tour is to recreate the Bronze Age to allow the visitors to see the collections situating in the original context. The discoverability part of the VR tour design is worse than Tate Modern’s, since there is only one piece of plain text information about the tour, and if the visitors want to learn more, they have to contact the office. There are no further background information and the visitors cannot even see what the exhibit looks like. Similar to Tate Modern, there is no way for the visitors to discover this VR tour organically on the museum homepage, because there is simply no sign of this VR tour’s existence. Therefore, this VR tour fails to achieve both discoverability and accessibility.
The other British Museum VR tour takes a slightly different turn. In 2017, the museum launches an Egyptian gallery VR tour that utilizes primary Facebook’s News Feed (states that it gives the best result) accompanies a VR headset (recommend Samsung Gear VR headset). With these two components, the visitors are able to immerse themselves in the gallery without time and location restrictions, which is a huge improvement from the previous two examples. However, this creates another accessibility problem, which is the budget. Currently, on the market, a Samsung VR headset costs around 130 dollars, which can be quite a huge expense for a lot of visitors that are interested in VR tours. Even if the visitors can spend money on a headset, is there enough incentives for them to do so with a single VR tour (Explore ancient Egypt in our Virtual Reality tour)?
From these three examples at Tate Modern and the British Museum, it is clear that they still have a long way to go in terms of discoverability and accessibility. Unlike collection catalogues and digital archives, both of the museums do not list VR tours specifically on their homepages, so it is very difficult for the visitors to find them. While the Egyptian VR tour at the British Museum allows the visitors to explore the collection without time and space limitations, a problem regarding budget arises.
Therefore, after weighing their pros and cons, I conclude two points that I would like to advocate for future museum VR tours in regards to discoverability and accessibility. With discoverability, museums’ homepages should at least have an option under “The Collection” or “Explore” that is dedicated to VR tours like the collection catalogues and digital archives, in order to make them more visible and allow the visitors to discover them more easily. The museums can also consider conducting surveys and organize the information by user experience design tools, such as personas and usability reports to better understand what serves best for the visitors.
Second, it is an improvement for the British Museum to put its VR tours on the go, so the visitors can enjoy immersive experiences anytime and anywhere. However, the price of the device might deter a lot of potentially interested visitors. Therefore, I would like to advocate for the museums to develop apps that are compatible with affordable VR headsets, such as Google Cardboard.
Some might argue that those two proposals will be a waste of resources and time for the museums, since VR tours are not yet an important part of the museums and they might not last. However, I believe museums will only look forward to develop more engaging ways of storytelling, and VR is an excellent way to immerse the visitors that collection catalogues and digital archives cannot compete with, as art historian and museologist Bernadette Biedermann states: “... the virtual can increase user exposure to the physical object because it allows access to collections that are not physically available for any reason and make users more curious about the original”. She further states that this argument is verified by the neuroscientific studies that “Neither can one person undergo an experience of somebody else, nor can one medium replace the experience which another medium produces” (Biedermann, 284-285). Even if VR tours do develop into something slightly different in the future, it is still a useful record and reference for the museums, just like online collection catalogues begin to slowly replace the physical ones, but the physical version still provides a solid base for how the materials can be migrated online.
Another argument might emerge that the reason why museums utilize certain companies’ headsets is because the collaboration allows the museums to have more resources into developing larger scale content, such as the British Museum’s collaboration with Samsung that allows them to build educational programs that have attracted over 100,000 students and families (Your Support: Success Stories, Samsung). However, that is still limited to school programs, if they extend them to app versions that are compatible with Google Cardboard (a simpler VR headset, which generally cost less than 15 dollars) or other affordable headsets, the effects will be much greater, since it will extend to wider and younger audiences. As a large part of museum fundings come from donors, the more visitors imply more potential donors, which in terms help the museums develop better exhibits. The Metropolitan Museum in New York discovers that after incorporates VR into its exhibit, the average age of visitors drops from 60 to 27 from 2011 to 2014 (Erlick).
For museums’ limited budget, it is understandable that museum professions are reluctant to invest more money into developing VR tours that have not yet been concretely proven as successful. However, according to the statistics from AAM, museums in America attract around 850 million visits as well as millions of online visits each year and contribute $50 billion to the US economy per year (AAM). Public’s interests in museums are already high, it will definitely be beneficial to develop VR tours to attract more visitors of all ages. For museums that require tickets, VR tours will bring in more revenue; for museums that are free, there will definitely be more donations and attract more public attention through sponsorships and advertisements.
From collection catalogues, digital archives, to VR museum tours, museums are constantly finding ways to improve ways to make their exhibitions more engaging and accessible to the public. Even though VR museum tours are still in their infancy, analyzing examples such as Tate Modern and the British Museum allow us to weigh their pros and cons to find the best practices. The process will likely consume a sufficient amount of museums’ energies and resources, yet those developments have lasting benefits for the public as well as the museums themselves. To make VR tours more easy to discover and accessible allow the public to get closer to the collections, which make them curious and appreciate the art more as a whole. This will have a massive impact that encourages people to explore within the art world, which is one of the most important reasons why museums exist.