For a long time, the way of museums, galleries, and famous interests displaying their digital content are doesn’t changed, no matter online or on site. As far as I know, in some museums in China, you can rent a tool that allows visitor enter a code near the item, and listen the audio guide content. It’s a good idea, and many museums are doing that, but if we take further, the visitors can rent a VR equipment, their visiting experience will have a big changed! They can watch VR/AR content about the item, or a theme.
However, there’re still some problems for doing this.
It’s still very expensive for some museums to afford VR equipment, not to mention creating the VR content for their items. For content production, I think they can hire university students to help them, or let the contractor do this. For the money doing this, it can be a crowed funding program, donate to this, benefit from this. Or ask their government. Or maybe the ‘United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’ can start a foundation for museum collections and interests digitize, especially for VR content.
To make museum collections become more easy to be watch, why not put them on XBOX, PS4? It can be a game, or just an app, with game handle, people can freely explore the collections, even they don’t have VR equipment.
As a result, anytime, anywhere, people can easily access the collections VR content, or just digitized content. It can be global fund, global share.
BUT, let’s go back to money. This kind of VR/AR are usually free to view, let people to pay them just like pay the ticket to visit the museum or gallery? YES, it’s a good idea, but the content should be extremely good quality, otherwise people won’t pay it.Or, let the commercial ads enter the VR world? Not bad, I believe most people don’t like ads, but if it can make the VR be substantial, why not do that? But I think the ads should be relevant to the content they are viewing, and we already have this kind of technology.
