Extended Reality in the Media Museum

Can you tell us something about yourself and your role at Sound & Vision?

Alina: “My name is Alina and I work here as a UX designer. I actually do both UX design and UX research. The goal of that is really to understand the user experience and to design for the user experience. The idea behind UX design is to see design as something that's never finite. You can always make it better. You do the best you can, you get feedback and then you go back and you say, “Okay, well, how do I really make this fit the user requirements?”. What's interesting in the process, is there'll be moments where you're just frustrated and then there'll be moments where something clicks and suddenly everyone's really happy with the result. So it's a really fun process, actually.”

“The idea behind UX design is to see design as something that's never finite. You can always make it better.” 

You are the UX designer for TRANSMIXR. Can you tell us something about the project?

Alina: “The project is very cool. It has a social XR focus, meaning there is going to be a virtual reality experience with two people that are going to be connected in a way that you can actually see their body in virtual reality, and be with each other in this virtual world. It's not just using avatars or seeing each other in 2D on a screen, but really being together and interacting with each other.” 

“The idea is we're taking that innovative XR technology and implementing that in a context of cultural heritage. So in our case with Sound & Vision, we're trying to create a way for children and parents to not only discover, but really experience the scale of the huge archive that we have here.”

And that’s where you come in!

Alina: “Yeah! So the project is very much about how do we show the size of the archive and how do we actually get people to interact with the digital media objects in a fun and meaningful way. There's always questions when you're creating an immersive experience: Why is it immersive? What are we trying to achieve? For the project, my job is to answer these questions and design the best experience possible.”

Why is it so important to bring this technology to the sector?

Alina: “We know that children love immersive experiences. They love to be fully engaged. We also know that there's value in getting to interact with a partner. Getting to see them, see their facial expressions. The added value for users really is in that shared experience, really connecting people. So what we're really trying to understand now, is how we take this valuable technology to design interaction with archival media that is of value. 

“The technology is very expensive, so the whole point of TRANSMIXR is not only designing the experience for the archive of Sound & Vision, but to design a template based on the archives’ metadata that can be used by different organizations to support their own goals. Often small museums don't have very much space or money, but they want to give people a chance to explore their archive. TRANSMIXR aims to provide this experience that works in a small space in a really fun, innovative way.”

“The added value for users really is in that shared experience, really connecting people.”

Where are you now and what is to come?

Alina: “So we've created a story for the experience that we're calling The Space Archivists. The idea is that an archive is sent to space by the government that preserves the future memory of humankind. It's been broken and the users need to fix it. We really want to make that story come to life by creating this immersive space where users really feel like they're in outer space in this archive, and also giving them very physical ways of interacting with the media from the archive where they can touch it in a way that they couldn't on a computer. So those are all things that we're exploring.”

“So our plan is to have something in the museum that can be accessible to the public by the middle of next year. And I can't wait! We still have a lot of work to do, but I'm excited. And after that of course we have to make sure the reusable template can be used by other institutions so this technology becomes more widely available to the public.”