Augmented & mixed realities in cultural institutions. The prognosis of post-reality
What about new technologies in museums and cultural institutions? In UK and US recent museum boom has been caused by investments in new technologies that attract more and younger visitors: interactive exhibitions, dedicated applications, and chatbots as personal guides. How GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) uses new trends in post-reality technologies, and should it?
I have written about examples of artificial intelligence applications in museums on Contemporary Lynx. Meanwhile, it is Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) that seem to have been created for use in the field of art. The question is whether the virtual reality, which has had a long inrun, at least since the famous Sensorama in the 1950s, will finally fire up enough to become a standard in institutions all over the world? Or maybe it will be overtaken by Augmented Reality technologies, which are easier to commercialize?
In the annual trendbook released by Insight Future, polish futurologist Natalia Hatalska pointed to post-reality as the dominant trend of the future. The physical and virtual worlds have become inseparable, together creating a new form of reality: post-reality — we read at the beginning. This term, although suggesting the end of reality as we know it, rather tries to describe the consequences of the emerging new formulas of its experience influenced by new technologies. „We do not use technology, as much as we live them” as media theorist Langdon Winner once put it accurately. In fact, the boundaries of being online and offline have become more and more fluid and blurred thanks to the ubiquitous Wi-Fi and LTE networks that allow you to use the Internet virtually non-stop. We no longer enter and leave the Internet, we are constantly in the access mode.
More and more often we hear about the notion of Mixed Reality (XR) — that combines the real and virtual worlds, in order to create a completely new environment in which physical and digital objects coexist. Mixed reality not only imposes virtual objects on our reality but blends them into our world and allows the user to interact with them.
What would potentially further enhance this experience?
First of all, faster data transmission. 5G technology — a new generation of mobile network standard, faster and more stable - is lurking from the future. 5G is supposed to set an infrastructure for the Internet of Things and yet another step towards the universality of ambient computing. Asia has so far the greatest chance of its rapid implementation, although the UE does not want to lag behind, working on new 5G agenda for entire Europe. The 5G strategy for Poland, announced by the Ministry of Digitalization, assumes that the first city “within reach” of the 5G network will be Łódź around 2020. However, it is only 2025 that will bring mass connection to the network of most Polish cities.
Year of VR, this time for real
Both Polish and international technological foresight indicate that we’re getting closer to real VR/AR and that the purchasing value of those two technologies markets will grow dynamically. Nielsen Superdata in its latest report on the XR market reported that 2019 will be a defining moment for the industry and probably a real breakthrough for virtual reality. The value of combined markets for immersive technologies is expected to reach $40 billion in three years. The Statista has gone even further, forecasting this potential to reach as much as $210 billion in 2022. During the European Start-Up Days in Poland, it was declared that the VR area alone would be worth as much as 120 billion dollars by the end of the decade. Numbers and financial models swell, as well as consumer expectations.
The main target group would be, of course, millenials, more than familiar with digital technologies, willing to experiment with latest trends such as wearables, driving force of gaming industry, followed by the first fully digital natives: Z and Y generations.
Digital platforms: Google, Microsoft, and Facebook outdo each other in the race for VR/AR leadership. More and more research is conducted on VR/AR capabilities, as was evident at the Facebook F8 conference, when a whole segment of the presentation was devoted to virtual reality. New versions of headsets are being released: starting with the Oculus Quest expected for the coming months. Quest is expected to be a turning point for the VR industry, the first mass-purchased hardware, just in 2019. Oculus also presented as a new prototype — Half Dome, with a variable focal length that significantly improves image contrast and field of view similar to the human eye.
Grand monopolies are chased by start-ups: Magic Leap working on mixed reality solutions raised over two billion dollars from investors without even showing the prototype of its product. The official premiere of the long expected equipment took place in August 2018. Ambitious Varjo’s is working intensively on its patented bionic display — visionary product, which would allow enjoying a VR image in resolution indistinguishable from the human eye. Investors also believed in Finnish start-up dream of: they have just closed a round of financing at the level of 31 million dollars.
According to Gartner’s chart, the VR and AR markets are stabilizing and entering the creative development phase, should museums start to get used to these technologies?
Museum boom
As well as estimates of the potential post-reality market, digital resources of museums and cultural institutions will swell. Over the last 10 years at least 100 million PLN has been spent in Poland on digitization of museum resources. The total number of museum collections amounted to almost 11 million objects!
At the same time, the museum boom continues.
There are more and more museums: in 2013 in Poland existed 822 museums, in 2017 almost 950. Museums are becoming more and more important for building and maintaining cultural identities.
Last year, 37.5 million people visited Polish museums (3.2% more than in 2016). This is an ever-growing, promising market: museums visitors are well educated and asses their material situation as very good.
American Alliance of Museums estimates that only in U.S. cultural institutions welcome 850 million visits per year — more than most sporting events representing $21 billion in direct economic activity.
Visitors want to pay for a well-designed, interactive exhibition, and they have something to choose from: last year more than 5.7 thousand exhibitions took place in Poland. Narrative museums, which make use of new technologies: multimedia applications and interactive games, augmented and virtual reality, are becoming increasingly popular.
This year the Museum of the Second World War was the first museum in Poland to open its VR zone offering a “Virtual Walk around Westerplatte”: material created from 100 original panoramas, several dozen archival photographs, historical recordings of accounts and soundtracks. A total of six stations equipped with Oculus Rift headset.
More ambitious VR projects are undertaken in the most visited museums around the world. The British Tate Modern is known as progressive in adopting new technologies recently used VR to reconstruct Modligani’s studio during this year’s large-scale exhibition devoted to the Italian painter. The project, which was very carefully carried on, required five months of preparation and involvement of interdisciplinary teams. Another great example is the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, which has integrated the VR room into its permanent exhibition on evolution. A journey into the process of species formation was designed not only to educate but also to arouse authentic curiosity. The exhibition, based on virtual reality, is carefully composed and conceived as an intimate, contemplative, almost intimate experience, contrasted with the usual hustle and bustle of museum halls.
One of the most popular applications of post-reality technologies is, of course, education. Auckland Museum in New Zealand — one of the most interesting museums in the world, collaborated with Microsoft HoloLens in creating three-dimensional models of exploding volcanoes and reconstructing the immersive experience of the First World War front.
Another field for exploration is the idea of a virtual museum. Considering the gigantic amount of art collected by the institutions and the limited possibilities of its exposition, the virtual museum opens up completely new ways of exploring collections. What if, instead of presenting just 2% of the valuable holdings, we could show all of the heritage collected over generations? How do we make art accessible to everyone, regardless of the country they live in or degree of disability?
This was the aim of the Kremer Museum, an entirely virtual space designed by architect Johan van Lirop from the renowned Libeskind studio. Founded in 1994, the private collection of Dutch masters is available to anyone who owns VR gear, any place in the world. Founders of the collection, explaining their decision, argued that barriers such as time and costs of building a physical museum, which could be visited by a very limited number of visitors, can be overcome with the use of the latest technological solutions.
Virtual walks in 360 are offered by most of the big institutions, but Kremer Museum went even further, creating a hyperealistic and spatially well-designed immersion into the world of art. Our journey as collectors has always been about finding the highest quality artworks and simultaneously finding ways to share them with as many people as possible. We can make a greater contribution to the art world by investing in technology rather than in bricks and mortar for our collection.”— said George Kremer.
For the creation of the museum, each painting has been photographed between 2,500 and 3,500 times using the ‘photogrammetry’ technique to build one ultra-high resolution visual model for each painting, allowing the museum’s visitors to enjoy a deeply immersive experience with the paintings. Using VR technology, visitors will be able to examine the artworks’ surface and colors up-close, as well as view the reverse of the paintings to explore each work’s unique stamps of provenance.
c. 1634, http://www.thekremercollection.com/jacob-adriaensz-backer/
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is creating a similar solution, which tries to reconstruct its most valuable objects in virtual space using advanced photogrammetry.
Immersive technologies can also help visitors while in the physical museum. The possibilities of using augmented reality through the development of ARCore, Google’s platform for creating augmented reality content and its iOs equivalent, ARkit, are becoming easier to implement. Thanks to the internet access and their own smartphone, they can get access to helpful information about the objects they are watching: their history, meaning, symbolism or the fascinating process of creation with scanned drawings and sketches. We are currently working on such a project with the National Museum in Warsaw and the Mind the Art team.
Promises of the future vs hard reality
Despite optimistic forecasts, the current state of immersive technologies is still far from high expectations. Facebook showcase during F8 was disappointing: the flagship idea was television in VR. Of course, we all like to watch TV together: sport or our favourite TV series are meant to be watched in a larger crowd, but all the fun comes from observing the reactions of the other people. It is hard to imagine that this experience could be replaced by weird avatars and terrible picture quality, which is still far from the resolution of average TV sets available on the market.
Magic Leap’s long-awaited premiere hasn’t spammed an expected euphoria, the first reviews of their headset emphasized only a slight experience improvement compared to Microsoft’s HoloLens. Numbers don’t look good, despite optimistic prognosis. Oculus Go’s investments in product improvement have already reached billions of dollars, generating low revenues, and the affordable Oculus Go didn’t conquer the market as expected. In the first half of 2018, only 289,000 sets were sold.
Nokia closed its VR department, an industry-renowned immersion solutions studio Jaunt drowned burnt millions in an attempt to implement its VR solutions and eventually move on to a more promising XR. Gossips are spread that HTC is trying to sell its flagship Vivo headset.
What is still missing? An authentic technological breakthrough. It seems that the VR industry once again made a false start by releasing underdeveloped hardware. In order for the VR revolution to take place, we need innovative a market-ready product, just like Apple Iphone, which revolutionized the mobile market and outrun all other companies by at least 5 years. It is worth to remember that Microsoft showed its smartphone as early as around 2006, but it was only the iconic Steve Jobs presentation in 2007, that completely overturned our thinking about smartphones.
People inside the industry repeat the same thing: VR hardware needs at least 3 to 5 years for a technological breakthrough. The same goes for the development of efficient software and engaging content. At this point in time, augmented and hybrid reality has the greatest chance for rapid implementation responding to real problems.
***
New technologies could revolutionise traditional approach to art and its institutions, merge education and entertainment, and finally dissolve the boundary between visitor and user. They could open up hitherto unknown possibilities of collecting data about their audience and their experiences.
We need to foster cooperation between tech industries and cultural institutions. Smithsonian Museum partners with Intel in developing its virtual collections. Tate Modern projects and the Museum of Natural History in Paris would not have been possible without the generous support of VIVE Arts, the HTC Foundation, which offers grants for cultural institutions in the implementation of projects using HTC Vive products. Despite the hardware shortcomings, the market’s biggesr problem is the lack of high quality content. Establishing partnerships, both with large companies and start-ups museums can create spaces for experimenting and testing the most engaging products, which — as promised by modern futurologists — will create the framework for our new reality.
