Curatours — bringing back visitors to museums, galleries and heritage sites.
This week, Cooperative Innovations announced a new digital platform ‘Curatours’ to open the virtual doors of popular cultural institutions, museums and galleries. It’s being sold as a platform for social, cultural, virtual tours. For anyone, Anywhere. — This sounds intriguing.
The Curatours app will offer an immersive experience where visitors can skip queues and get closer to artefacts, precious objects and put questions to the experts on live tours.
You will be able to access the ‘Curatours’ app via a smartphone, a tablet, PC, web browsers or a VR headset with the ability to choose tailored tours, join friends, family, classmates and others online, and experience cultural and heritage sites that before now were unable to visit.
The off-site digital tour platform unlocks new opportunities for institutions to display their collections, galleries and exhibitions to a global and more diverse audience. With the ongoing impact to the travel and tourism industries, this comes at a time when institutions have seen a dramatic drop in visitor numbers and the digital experience they offer has become more important than ever.
To date, virtual tours can feel like a solitary one-way experience. Curatours is a solution to this, making the experience a social one that can be shared with multiple people including a real, life guide who you can talk to and ask questions.
“At Cooperative Innovations bringing people together virtually is our aim and after four years of R&D coupled with the Innovate UK grant we are developing the technology to achieve this.” — Emma Cooper, Project Lead
There are two parts to the ‘Curatours’ platform, the end user app and a maker, which together help cultural institutions to create, experience and host social offsite tours.
Curatours App
The Curatours app offers an accessible and enhanced way for visitors to experience museums and galleries, safely at their own pace or together with friends, classmates and family without having to travel anywhere. Whilst on a tour, visitors can:
- Look in detail at 3D captures of artefacts and environments;
- Take part in Live Tours and ask questions to the guide;
- Interact with their friends, family, classmates and other visitors;
- Read text, view images and watch videos;
- Watch pre-recorded 3D performances;
- Listen to audio recordings.
Curatours Maker
Curatours Maker enables creatives, gallery designers and heritage site experts to deliver offsite tours for digital visitors to enjoy. By repurposing existing content and creating new material, curators and public engagement teams will have an adaptable way of interpreting, configuring and tailoring tours for different visitors’ needs. Benefits include:
- Easily integrate artefact and environment scans;
- Upload and re-use existing text, image, audio and video content;
- Create rich interactions and repurpose existing interpretations;
- Setup & schedule free or paid Live Tours for specific times;
- Pre-record a tour for visitors to enjoy at their own leisure;
- View artefact and space interaction and usage analytics;
- Link to their online shop;
- Set donation and visitor fee details.
Set to launch in early 2021, the platform is in the development stage with early partners including the Anne Frank House and National Trust Scotland already involved and they’re actively looking for additional partners for the platform launch.
Check out their video below to get a feel for Curatours;
They are currently looking for project partners so if you are interested or know someone who is make sure you share the news with them and get in touch.
Make sure you check out Cooperative Innovations launch blog on how Curatours came to be here for additional information.
Then follow the Curatours Twitter to keep up to date with them and see what happens in 2021.
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