Abstract:

With the advent of Internet, and the spread of technology, museums and cultural institutions have foreseen a new opportunity to make culture more accessible to a wider audience, investing large amounts of money and time. But unfortunately, the impact of those efforts still needs to be probed, since other complex barriers remain, like inequalities in education resulting from class differences. Our project deals with the challenge of helping museums to re-value their collections, taking advantage of the new possibilities offered by a new generation of Augmented Reality glasses to induce a pedagogical and emotional response in museum visitors.

Within the context of museums, there is a growing recognition of the capacity of games as excellent facilitators of the motivation and mentality required at informal learning; Indeed, this inertia has increased with the emergence of digital technologies, which offers new possibilities to present content, far from the purely informative narratives. However, most of the existing solutions have several limitations, since museums continue working as they did in the past, with long periods of preparation and limited interaction. Traditional museums techniques (studied by the museology and museography) are not applicable in the virtual and 3D environment. Museums need new methodologies to interact with the digitalised content and audiences.

In recent years, we have seen some interesting experiences that combine Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) to present heritage through narratives that motivate collections exploration in immersive environments, while using a certain dramatic and didactic tension. Such "contextualized interactive narratives" are shaking the traditional notion of museums. In this paper, we will analyse some of those proposals (like MicroRangers form the American Museum of Natural History; Murder at the Met from the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York; Back to Life a collaboration between the Natural History Museum of London and Google Arts & Culture or The Lost Palace, from the Whitehall Palace of London). At the same time, we will analyse a group of videogames that use strategies that are applicable to museum experiences (like Assassin's Creed, as a game that recreates other cultures and immerse us in a different era; or Fragments, as a game created by HoloLens with a storytelling with an emotional narrative). To conclude we will present our experience and different proposals created for museums by our research group that use these techniques.

Museums are examining new ways to tell stories, while raising new challenges. We don’t know what the museum of the future will look like, but we are beginning to understand more clearly the needs of these new entities. There are still many aspects to be defined and refined, but the time to go further has come. The experience of the museum visitor of the 21st century marks an evident tendency towards the personalization of content, personal interpretation, interactivity, and immersive experiences that facilitate access and control of content in a more natural and intuitive way. Through the use of a new museology adapted to the new needs, we believe it is possible to reach those potential visitors who, despite having less cultural capital, can approach these institutions.

Keywords:

Museums, Videogames, audience engagement, museology methodologies, Interactive, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Immersive, Storytelling.