At European institutions, visitors are immersed in history and art experiences
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At the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, visitors can take a trip to an ice-blue celestial plane surrounded by an aurora borealis. There, a branching orb traces 460 species, including humans, back to the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA, a small single-celled organism thought to be the common origin of all current life on earth.
It’s a new permanent virtual reality installation at the museum, where visitors can don a headset to explore connections between species and zoom in on creatures, simulating the experience, for example, of standing right in front of an elephant to understand its size.
Bruno David, president of the museum, said it would be impossible to illustrate the same concept if restrained by the traditional means of physical object and text, so the museum turned to technology. The museum renovated a room to permanently house five VR stations and plans to offer a VR sea-diving experience during a 2019 exhibition.
Virtual reality, he said, could help make the taxidermy gallery ? home to Louis SV’s pet rhinoceros ? a little less stuffy.
“My aim was to introduce technology of the 21 st century into the world of a museum, which is generally not regarded as such,” Mr. David said.
France’s National Museum of Natural History is just one of many cultural and art institutions using the technology as a new way to engage visitors.
While this museum has gone all in, others have been experimenting with VR before committing portions of their budgets.
In 2015, the British Museum was one of the first institutions to offer a virtual reality experience in a weekend event dedicated to Bronze Age objects and showing them in their original context. Hannah Boulton, head of press and marketing at the museum, said a testing process over the past few years has sought to find where VR could have the most impact for the institution.
“For us, it’s about audience engagement,” she said. “We don’t want to be doing it for VR’s sake. What we want to do is use VR where it can lend that extra context.”
The museum has since also released a virtual tour of its Egyptian gallery, which can be explored through either a web browser or a VR headset.
Tate Modern in London has integrated VR into its current Modigliani retrospective: Visitors can explore the artist’s Paris studio.
Since there is no photographic record of the artist’s final home, the Tate undertook painstaking research to create it as a virtual reality space. A team took forensic-level photographs of the present-day studio, now private property, and designed furniture based on photos from the artist’s time.
“VR has value for us as interpretation tool,” said Hilary Knight, head of digital content at Tate. “It’s a way of conveying feeling, helping people feel a connection with an artist. It’s a different way of absorbing that information, and it makes the artist a living person.”
While VR might be an obvious attraction for younger, tech-hungry audiences, institutions are finding older visitors are also eager to explore digital worlds.
The National Museum of Finland in Helsinki uses a new VR feature to transport visitors into R.W. Ekman’s painting “The Opening of the Diet 1863 by Alexander II,” allowing them to speak with the Russian emperor and other depicted characters.
Hanna Forssel, head curator of education, expected the feature to appeal mostly to the under-18 set that makes up one-third of the museum visitors. Instead, she was surprised by the interest from all ages.
When the feature started recently, she said, “There was a long line of mainly older people over 60.”
Ms. Knight said she would like to use VR more in future exhibitions, but despite the success of the Modigliani experience, she is still uncertain about sustainability. Ms. Boulton also said the British Museum’s VR projects are “heavily funded” by technology partners.
“It’s hard to create a strategy at the moment, because we don’t yet know where funding for these kinds of projects will come from,” Ms. Knight said. “Visitors ask about future exhibitions, so there is an appetite.”
Creating VR programs is expensive, especially for public institutions that have seen budgets slashed in recent years. Last year, the consumer electronics company HTC, which makes VR headsets, started VIVE Arts, a multimillion-dollar initiative that funds and develops VR content for museums and cultural institutions.
Victoria Chang, director of VIVE Arts, said the program had been in response to an increase in the number of requests that HTC began receiving about two years ago and that continued to grow.
“It was important for us to be able to foster this phenomenon in a more systematic way,” Ms. Chang said.
She said VR would soon be just as important to a museum as its website.
“When the internet was just developing, institutions didn’t see the need to have an online presence,” Ms. Chang said. “Now, with social media and cellphones, all the major institutions have apps.”
The VR experiences from the Tate and the French National Museum of Natural History are available online to the public. As for critics who worry that such sites might keep some people at home and out of museums, institutions agree that virtual will never replace the real but can enhance it.
“People are coming to a museum to see real objects because real objects are emotional,” Mr. David said. “If you’re going to L’Orangerie, it’s to see Monet’s original “Water Lilies,’ not to see copy. Otherwise, on your computer you can see much better images than the real things.”
