HOLOMUSEUM: A HOLOLENS APPLICATION FOR CREATING EXTENSIBLE AND CUSTOMIZABLE HOLOGRAPHIC EXHIBITIONS

Museums are considered as ideal places to tell stories, bringing people together, and stirring dialogue between visitors and experts with the aim of creating and transmitting knowledge, while challenging their own interpretations and arousing passions. Since the advent of Internet, and the development of mobile technology, these institutions have foreseen a new opportunity to communicate the collections to a wider audience. This digital revolution has redefined the public role of museums, offering new opportunities that should be seized, not only from the technological point of view, but also to improve content strategies and narratives. Just as in the eighteenth century museums adapted their buildings to accommodate a greater number of visitors, in the 21st century, they will have to adapt to include information circulation.

From our research group at the Universitat Politècnica de València, we are convinced that Augmented Reality (AR) is the next digital revolution that will affect the way we relate to digital data. During the last two years, we have carried out some experiences where we use Augmented Reality view-through glasses - Microsoft HoloLens- in museums context. An example of this experiences is Holomuseum, an authoring tool we have created to help museum curators to create their own exhibitions using this technology. The system solves several important problems: those technical difficulties to manage and maintain virtual content in the real space, and facing the absence of standardised interaction languages for this new media.

In this regard, we have worked in the development of new methodologies to use this new technology, what we have called museography 4.0, which allows using different techniques to present the information related to the objects in a more naturalized and spontaneous way. Last year, we carried out an exhibition where we evaluated the use of Holomuseum with different types of contents and users. In this presentation, we want to present some of the results from this study while introducing our future plans.

We are living an exciting time in the context of museums and digital technology, where we still have thousands of ways to go. Although it is an early stage, we can begin to understand the great pedagogical possibilities that this tools offer in museum context. With them, we have experienced new ways of storytelling that can help museums to bringing heritage to life in ways that are profound and unforgettable, of course when using the suitable methodologies and creativity.