The past is the future as Scotland's museums head to the metaverse

The relationship between museum, visitor and object is set to shift on a fundamental level with the £5.6m Museums in the Metaverse project, which is being led by the University of Glasgow with National Museums Scotland and Historic Environment Scotland among its partners.

Thousands of objects are being digitised into the highest resolution possible and explored like never before using virtual reality headsets.

In the metaverse, the mighty stone walls of the august institutions which hold these objects will come tumbling down. The glass cases which separate these objects from us will disappear and the distances crossed and journeys travelled to see these objects will simply evaporate.

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In the metaverse, we will get closer to these objects than ever before. Indeed, we might even climb inside them.

Professor Murray Pittock, of the University of Glasgow, is leading on the MiM project at the university’s Advanced Research Centre.

He said: “One of the things that the tech does, that is universally wanted, is that it enables people to get inside very big objects, for example getting inside the Hunterian’s 1785 walrus skull.

“People loved being inside a walrus skull.

“Likewise the giant beetles, which of course aren’t really giant when you see them, they are actually quite wee, but you can inflate them like Cronenberg’s The Fly. People love those as well.

“Scalibility is absolutely key to the enjoyment and excitement that people got from them. The sense that you can get up close and personal with objects - or even get inside them.”

The project is working with museum collections both in Scotland and around the world to create a ground-breaking Extended Reality (XR) Culture and Heritage platform.

One side of the platform will allow visitors, who will be fitted with a VR headset for the most powerful immersive experience, to gain access to an array of museums, objects and new experiences.

On the other side, everyone can become a curator and build their own collections and exhibitions in new virtual worlds.

Crucially, the project will allow greater access than ever before to museum collections which hold the vast majority of their items in stores and out of view.

Professor Pittock said: “It offers a way of being able to access material which is not visible on museum displays which would otherwise be very time consuming to access . Ninety per cent, roughly speaking - and sometimes it is as high as 99 and it is almost never less than 50 per cent - of museum materials are held remotely off display so it gives a point of access to that.

"It gives potential access to exhibitions that I might want to visit but might be very difficult to visit and / or are too expensive to visit.

“ Or perhaps, I just don’t have the time and they are closed before I get to them. So it keeps exhibitions open for longer and it enables someone like myself who works or who is interested in material culture - smaller pieces of material culture - for example jewellery, coins, medals - to see them in much more detail than you can in a museum environment.

“ Obviously people there can’t get too close because of security and quite honestly a lot of these things can’t be seen properly in current displays.”

Professor Pittock said the creative potential and commercial opportunities of Museums in the Metaverse could be illustrated by two recent exhibitions.

Last year, the Musée d'Orsay launched the immersive ‘Meet the Impressionists’ to complement its ‘Paris 1874 Inventing Impressionsim’ show which allowed visitors to “talk” to artists such as Degas and Monet.

Professor Pittock said: “That went on for about six months . It took around 1.25M Euro in income. You paid 16 Euro extra when you went into Musée d'Orsay to access that and we think it covered its costs and a bit more and now it has moved to the US. It is now going to move around the world until the tech gets out of date, perhaps in three to four years time.

“So you have made both a profitable experience and you have enlarged the audience.

"The same thing is happening now with the Last Days of Pompeii which was done by Madrid Artes Digitales but opened in the Media Quarter in Vienna . That is brilliant. That is the state which we should be able to surpass. It is amazing what can be done.

"One of the things to notice is that Continental Europe is certainly a bit ahead of the UK in terms of development.”

In Scotland, two “fully functioning environments” which access the metaverse have so far been created by the project. The first was a test site at the Advanced Research Centre where some of the several hundred objects digitised “at a level far beyond a level normally captured” could be accessed.

Meanwhile, the university laboratory of Lord Kelvin, the revered scientist and inventor, was recreated as part of the 200th anniversary celebrations of his birth. On a virtual blackboard, the last set of equations he wrote in his last lectures could be found.

It is expected that Museums in the Metaverse will create new income streams for Scotland’s museums but critical work to protect the intellectual property of institutions continued, Professor Pittock added.

With “budgets allowing”, it is expected that one-off exhibitions such as the Last Days of Pompeii could be staged in Scotland.

“That is the road ahead. Some of the things for example that Scotland could offer are virtual experiences that are strongly linked to iconic objects and places.

"I would think something that matches Scotland’s castles and landscapes within its context of material culture is really powerful. You can put the object back in the place where it first had its story,” Professor Pittock added.

New research just published by Museums in the Multiverse, which dre2 on responses from 2,000 people worldwide, found 79% expressed interest in using digital technology to explore cultural collections currently inaccessible to the public.

Professor Pittock said the prospect of viewing and experiencing objects in the metaverse didn’t weaken the appeal of the traditional museum.

"This research and previous research show that it doesn’t weaken these experiences. People value complementarity and they often pay physical visits to objects that they have encountered digitally,” he added.

Museums in the Metaverse will move towards “big scale user testing” in museums this year, funding allowing.