Immersive technologies: new ways of experiencing cultural heritage
Bringing cultural heritage to life, offering visitors a whiff, an echo of an ancient life, making them project themselves in another world or into another person’s shoes… It all has long been an important goal, particularly for human cultural mediation. As a result, the way some mediators tell the stories of cultural heritage as they lead their visit is very intense, and permanently marks those who follow and listen.
Yet since a couple of years, it is the digital tool which has been used to reach that purpose. Progressively, the physical and the virtual world came to be more and more intricate through technologies that we call today Augmented Reality(AR), Mixed Reality(MR) and Virtual Reality(VR). Whatever the terms, it is a fact that these immersive technologies have penetrated the field of cultural heritage, and are increasingly popular there.
That said, the point of digital cultural heritage is not to replace the physical one: it is to offer another type of encounter with it. It allows for completing, precising, adding layers of information on the physical objects. It also provides the visitor with the opportunity to recontextualize or approach cultural heritage either from a cognitive or sensitive, emotional point of view.
As a result, there are a lot of different types of technologies, going from augmented reality to virtual reality, to a mix between 360 video and virtual reality. In order to try and present quite a representative panel of experiences, which truly show how immersive technologies offer other means to appreciate cultural heritage, we will divide them in two great families.
Augmented visits
First, let’s talk about the “augmented visits”. The augmented visits are VR or AR experiences that follow most of the codes of classical guided tours, but which are enriched with “augmentations”.
Exploration and accessibility
These augmentations might simply be the possibility to visit or access non accessible places or times. For example, the ScanPyramids VR (installation at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in 2017) allowed for a group of people wearing HTC vive headsets to follow a guide at the heart of Kheops Pyramid, which is difficult to reach (impossible for some parts).
Interact with the world
Another “augmentation” is the possibility to interact with objects and modulate what kind of information you want on the object. Art of Corner, with their VR restitution of the Utrillo-Valadon workshop in Montmartre, permit just that.
Restore the context
At last, immersive technologies can provide the works of art with context. Indeed, in fall 2017, the Centre des monuments nationaux used our software Minsar (ex Minsight) to create a mixed-reality exhibition at Pierrefonds Castle. In the Salle des Preuses, they replaced holograms of Napoleon III’s collection of armors which are currently kept in the Invalides in Paris.
Relive past experiences
There is another type of experience that is particularly interesting: the experiences, mostly VR, which make the visitor relive a specific moment in time. King Tut VR from Eon Reality makes a good example here.
King Tut VR
The purpose of this application is to make the visitor travel back in time to live one of the most incredible archeological discoveries of all times: the tomb of Tutankhamun, found in 1922 by Howard Carter. In the experience, you are embodied in an avatar, and you can follow the journey that led Carter’s expedition to the tomb. There, you can actually dig in the sand to eventually discover the tomb and the objects inside, which have been digitized.
When History takes shape
The goal really is to put the visitor in Howard Carter’s shoes in order to give them a taste of what probably was one of the most important moments of his life. Somehow, History takes shape, and the visitor becomes embodied within it. The event of “discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb” becomes more than a date, it becomes more than words, it becomes an actual lived experience. It’s reinterpreted of course, for until we invent Herbert George Wells’ time-traveling machine, History is lost to us and we can never truly live it again. Yet it doesn’t mean that we can’t reactualize it somehow and experience it in another way.
Propose an artistic reinterpretation of History
Indeed, some applications went even further in the reinterpretation of History.
The Unfinished, by Innerspace VR
The Unfinished, VR experience made by Innerspace VR, puts you in a curator’s shoes in a museum, on the eve of an important exhibition about Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel. The entire experience is based on the true love and passionate story between the two sculptors, but the whole tone of the experience is oniric, poetic and lyric. Parts of the story are told by dancing characters which represent Claudel and Rodin, and of course other parts are reinterpreted or not completely accurate. Still, it conveys quite a right feeling about a love story that was passionate but somewhat violent, with a lot of psychological turmoil and hurt.
Another kind of truth
The story told might not be entirely historically accurate, but there might be another kind of truth, more related to feelings and impact than actual fact. Virtual reality is an excellent tool for this kind of engagement with cultural heritage: it has a huge emotional potential. Not only can it provide for a scientifically, cognitively enhanced experiences (with the “augmented visits” we talked about earlier), it can also provide for other types of approaches, some of them more emotional or artistic, which are approaches as legitimate as the traditional, historical-centered ones. However, it is important to let the public know what kind of experience they are living.
A great emotional and artistic potential
New artistic possibilities
Moreover, the emotional potential of immersive technologies, especially virtual reality, also implies great artistic possibilities. We’ve just seen it with The Unfinished, which is a very poetic experience. Yet we can find other applications which are completely artistic experiences, without any apparent link with history.
This is the case for the application made by Pietro Alberti at the Lalande Hotel of Bordeaux in 2018. In that VR experience, the artist proposed a reinterpretation of one of the rooms. He plays with shadows and lights to alienate the shape of the objects, the objects themselves become animated and grow or move in space, or he creates mirror effects that come and distort the perception we have of the room, almost leading to a certain abstraction.
The artistic purpose here is clear: it is an experience that aims at questioning the perception of the room and its objects, and reinterpret that perception in order to provide the visitor with a sensitive, artistic experience.
History and artistic imagination
That question of artistic vision also raises another very interesting problematic, that is to say the relationship between historical reality and artistic imagination, embedded within a same VR/AR experience.
Where is the limit, in that experience, between historical information and artistic reinterpretation? When can one say they are living an artistic experience, and when they are given historically accurate information?
We might address these exciting questions in a further article, which will lead us to the frontier between art and science.
To go further…
- HYLLAND Ole Marius. “Even Better than the Real Thing? Digital Copies and Digital Museums in a Digital Cultural Policy.” Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 9, no. 1 (2017): 62–84.
- KING Laura, STARK F. James, and COOKE Paul. “Experiencing the Digital World: The Cultural Value of Digital Engagement with Heritage.” Heritage & Society 9, no. 1 (2016): 76–101.
- LATOUR Bruno, and LOWE Adam. “The Migration of the Aura — or How to Explore the Original Through Its Facsimiles” Intermediality : History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, no. 17 (2011): 173–191.
- MILGRAM Paul, HARUO Takemura, and KISHINO Fumio. “Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum.” Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 1994.
- PANTER, Marie, DUCLOS-MOUNIER Pascale, MARTINAT Monica, and DEVIGNE Matthieu (dir). Imagination et histoire: enjeux contemporains. Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014.
