Museums want immersive, interactive experiences for their patrons

Phil Stuart
Science Museum Group Digital Lab
6 min readNov 4, 2017

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Museums want immersive, interactive experiences for their patrons. VR is a technology that’s being embraced more and more for its ability to take the viewer to the heart of new experiences. Putting the two together is a happy marriage but like all relationships, there could be some teething problems if the people involved in the process aren’t on the same page.

Virtual Reality tends to be a solo experience for the player/viewer. In a museum full of family and group visitors, this could be seen as a deterrent. But it doesn’t have to be! Tapping into the power of VR to create a unique visitor experience can take visitors to places they never dreamed of going, show them worlds unknown, and bring invisible or hard-to-fathom concepts to vivid, glorious life.

So the first thing to do when bringing VR into a museum is to decide on the boundaries that visitors can ‘play’ in.

The Science Museum’s first in-gallery VR experience, Handley Page VR, designed by Preloaded, was an experiment for the Science Museum’s Digital Lab — would VR enhance, instead of detract, from the visitor experience? Can it deepen the museum’s content messages? And would visitors welcome it?

The short answer to all three of these questions is a definitive ‘yes’ but getting there is down to a clear research and implementation stage.

What is Handley Page VR?

The Handley Page Gugnunc, a focal point of the Science Museum’s Mathematics gallery, was an experimental British aircraft built in 1929 and renowned for its design features. The aircraft is famous in aviation history for helping to solve a puzzle that had long eluded aviation experts: how to safely land an aircraft. Anyone who’s ever flown commercially can see why this was an important historical discovery…

The VR experience takes flight (if you’ll pardon the pun) from Handley Page’s aircraft hangar, right before the plane’s engine comes to life and the rotating propeller starts to pull the aircraft forward. The player is then transported into the aircraft and the skies around it, as they experience an exhibition flight, which not only shows how the aircraft flies but also how this could only be made possible through mathematics.

Preloaded’s design approach

Preloaded approached the design phase as we would any project, be it VR or a game: with the audience in mind.

There are a number of aspects to keep in mind when bringing VR into a museum or gallery space, including:

  • Does the design accommodate visitors with varying levels of technological competency?
  • Does the experience require facilitation from museum staff?
  • What physical factors and space constraints need to be taken into account?
  • What can be done in the design phase to mitigate motion sickness?

This is by no means an exhaustive list or a step-by-step process but more of a checklist of things to bear in mind when embarking on a VR endeavour.

1) Design for all visitors

VR can be an intense experience. This is both a good and a bad thing, Some adrenaline lovers are delighted to whoosh, swoop and fall from great heights, while others balk at the slightest drop. Not all VR experiences are the stuff of adrenaline junkies’ dreams but with Handley Page Gugnunc, we’re talking about a plane that takes off, rises to 5,000 feet and reaches speeds of 180kph.

So how did Preloaded avoid motion sickness? It’s all in the design and a careful use of ‘shots’. We avoiding tracking shots as well as near/mid-ground obstacles, and kept timely ‘blink’ transitions to keep locomotion to a minimum. We also made prudent use of visual effects and adopted VR best practice like avoiding fine pattern, textures, bright colours or flashing lights, particularly at the edges of the screen.

2) Design for immersion

There are many different types of VR headsets and the market is rapidly evolving and experimenting with new techniques. Handley Page VR is designed for use with the Samsung Gear VR headset with four-degrees of movement, and therefore the action takes place around the player. In pre-design phase testing, we determined that the best stereoscopic effect presented 3D objects moving up to 20 meters away from you, so we designed this VR experience to operate within that sweet spot. It was also important to make sure that nothing got too close to the viewers — no birds, for instance, to suddenly jump out at the player and cause them a fright.

Key moments of the immersive experience, like being inside the cockpit, or flying through wispy clouds, were all included to maximise immersion, and became our key moments that paced the experience.

3) Design for comfort

VR might transport you to new worlds but it does while keeping you firmly rooted, preferably in one spot for safety, in this world. So the question was: where in the gallery’s space will players view Handley Page VR, how much room is there for them, and will they be seated or standing while wearing the headset? It was decided that players should be seated. We also didn’t want them to have to crane their necks awkwardly or try spinning around to see a 360-degree view.

As an aside, 360-degree views in VR experiences don’t always give the best experience — it can be overwhelming and players may lose sight of some of the key messaging and moments with their attention being undirected and ‘elsewhere’. During testing, we determined that the best viewpoints for the experience would be 200 degrees horizontally and 135 degrees vertically. This ties in with the stereoscopic sweet spot to produce the best view possible for the audience.

4) Design for facilitation

Handley Page VR was always conceived as a facilitated experience, however we wanted the burden on the facilitator to be as minimal as possible. As such, Preloaded designed the VR experience with two users groups in mind: the players who’d wear the headsets and the Museum facilitators who’d guide them through the process. We made sure that facilitators would know how to quickly restart and made it clear to the players when the experience starts and ends so they would know to hand the device back to the facilitator.

5. Design to be a finite experience

The VR experience could not go on indefinitely. There needed to be a clear beginning and end for players to delineate the experience but also constrain how long each person could occupy one of the headsets. Handley Page VR was created at just under 5 minutes worth of immersive VR and designed ‘on rails’ to make it a consistent experience for all viewers. This level of consistency also allows for easier tracking and measurement of the project, which was particularly important for the Science Museum as this is their first-ever VR foray.

Audience reception

The project has been out there for the past 10 months and evaluation of the experience is helping to shape Science Museum’s future VR strategy.

The experience has been it’s been a fantastic success, with visitors demonstrating a stronger grasp of the gallery’s ‘airflow concept’, and critical understanding of the plane’s design features which warrant its inclusion in the exhibition.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of visitors had never experienced VR before. Almost everyone who tried the experience loved it, and the small majority that had tried other VR said it compared well or was cited as being higher quality.

Linear (non-VR) version of the Hanley Page VR experience

For more details of this project, please visit the case study on Preloaded‘s website.

Selected image credits: Science Museum and Zaha Hadid Architects

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