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TRANSMIXR at Immersive Tech Week 2024

In immersive environments, we are no longer constrained by the physical limitations of exhibition rooms. In this sense, eXtended Reality (XR) presents an exciting opportunity to rethink curatorial practices and the ways that audiences can engage with collections. But how? At Immersive Tech Week 2024 in Rotterdam, we hosted a workshop where we collectively imagined new exhibition and interaction formats with cultural heritage that go beyond the popular virtual museum format.

In immersive environments, we are no longer constrained by the physical limitations of exhibition rooms. In this sense, eXtended Reality (XR) presents an exciting opportunity to rethink curatorial practices and the ways that audiences can engage with collections. But how? At Immersive Tech Week 2024 in Rotterdam, we hosted a workshop where we collectively imagined new exhibition and interaction formats with cultural heritage that go beyond the popular virtual museum format.

mensen met post its aan een tafel

Photo by: Philine Kreuzer

It was my first time at Immersive Tech Week, a festival dedicated to all aspects of eXtended Reality (XR), including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). Every year the multi-day festival program is filled with talks, round tables, workshops, immersive experiences, and more. The venue, De Doelen —a concert hall and convention centre— is both beautiful and tricky to navigate. Fortunately, I was joined by my Sound & Vision colleagues Alina Goldman and Rasa Bocyte who have attended annually for the past several years and knew their way around. Together, we hosted the workshop Beyond Virtual Museums, inviting participants to envision XR experiences with cultural heritage through the lens of three guiding principles: unexpected places, unconventional formats, and surprising collaborations.

Out-of-the-box XR

The workshop drew a diverse group of participants, including designers, XR professionals, government officials, librarians, and even skeptics of XR technology. While we wanted imaginations to run wild with the array of diverse technological possibilities that XR can afford, we also kept in mind the barriers that may prevent organizations of various sizes and capacities from integrating such immersive experiences into their long-term audience engagement strategies. We divided participants into five groups and invited them to imagine ideas for fictional scenarios that included unique goals and challenges. After less than an hour of collaborative sketching and ideation activities, our groups were ready to pitch their work:

  • An AR-based guerrilla marketing campaign that brings the collection of a digital-only museum to bus stops, allowing the local community to explore contemporary queer heritage (photographs, oral histories, and memorabilia from European protests and events) in physical spaces.
  • An MR experience where participants collaborate to build and maintain a protective dike in the Netherlands, navigating historical environmental challenges through interactive play and teamwork while learning about the country's rich history of flood control and land reclamation techniques.
  • An AR experience hosted across multiple restaurants in the Balkans, bringing participants together around the region's shared intangible heritage (traditional music, crafts, and cuisine). It offers a multi-sensory experience where participants can see, touch, listen, and taste.
  • An MR exhibition in a small Slovak town that blends old and new technologies to retell local folklore. Using nostalgic tools like old computers and games, it offers immersive, interactive experiences designed to engage audiences of all digital literacy levels.
  • An AR experience inviting residents of a historic, rapidly gentrifying Rotterdam neighborhood to reconnect with 100 years of its social and architectural history while sharing their unique cultural perspectives and languages tied to these stories.

As you can see, these ideas showcase an impressive range of experiences and creativity, highlighting the potential of immersive technology to go beyond current popular trends and the community’s strong desire to engage in new forms of immersion.

TRANSMIXR

This workshop is being developed as part of an ongoing investigation in the framework of TRANSMIXR, a Horizon Europe innovation project that Sound & Vision is a part of. This interdisciplinary initiative brings together researchers, practitioners, and industry experts to explore meaningful applications of XR across diverse application areas including cultural heritage. Through our work within TRANSMIXR, Sound & Vision aims to contribute to making new immersive storytelling experiences more accessible to the entire cultural heritage sector, fostering innovation and collaboration across the field. 

We look forward to building on the success of this workshop, hosting future events that inspire creativity and collaboration, and continuing to share insights that push the boundaries of what’s possible with XR in cultural heritage. To stay in touch with our future work, visit transmixr.eu.

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