Original title: “Cure the museum fatigue” by XR, is the opportunity still flickering? “, the cover is from Visual China
When you walk into a museum today, if you find people around you poke the collection with your mobile phone, or wear VR glasses to shake your head up and down, it’s not that they went wrong, but they are touching a cross-dimensional Exhibition world.
This is the museum that is being “reset” by XR technology.
The so-called XR(an augmented reality) is the virtual reality (VR ), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality(MR ) and many other familiar visual interaction technologies are combined to realize the “immersive” experience of seamless transition between virtual world and real world.
The relationship between XR technology and the museum is far older than imagined. As early as 2003, VR appeared in the experience context of the museum. The Palace Museum established the Digital Institute of Cultural Assets. The first work to be shown to the public was the VR film “The Forbidden City: The Palace of the Son of Heaven.” However, this novelty really began to break out, or it should start from the 2016 VR/AR technology and enter the public eye.
How did this technological iteration that spanned time, region, and culture happen?
Technical wheels that have run through “museum fatigue”
Since 1916, Gilman has created a vocabulary – museum fatigue, and since then, the phenomenon of physical and mental exhaustion when visiting museums has attracted the attention of countless researchers. It can be said that every self-reform of the museum is centered around this core pain point.
We know that visiting a museum can be as simple as bringing a document and dialing the crowd in front of the cabinet to see it. But there are many unspeakable secrets in this. For example, when visiting a museum, even if you try hard to concentrate, it is easy to feel tired and bored. Or the venue is too big. If you go to the soles of your feet, you won’t be able to see it. If you don’t finish it, you can’t finish it. Things can only be allocated to less than ten seconds. When you walk out of the exhibition hall, you will unconsciously become a philosopher and ask “Who am I and where I am?”…
If you have this feeling, you may not be lacking in artistic cells, or lack of knowledge and high awareness. It is probably just like most people, because you have to breathe through the walls. Between, suffering from “Museum Fatigue” Museum fatigue.
In order to solve this problem, major museums have been working hard, and the main ideas are summed up in two:
One is to move from type display to narrative. Before the mid-20th century, the museum paid more attention to “collection” and “research”. However, according to the traditional exhibitions of style and category display, it is easy to make people feel tired after watching the collection for a long time. Since the 1970s, museums have gradually emphasized how to communicate with the audience, and the narrative, interesting, and interactive nature of the exhibition has become important. Many new concepts and new methods have been introduced into museums, such as voice interpreters.
64 years ago, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam launched the first museum audio guide. Since then, this hardware that tells the story and provides more information has become an integral part of the museum experience.
The second is to continuously expand the form of expression based on the unit information density. The museum exhibition exhibition in general is to highlight the cultural relics itself. However, with the development of the industry and the socialization of the exhibition project, on the one hand, the museum is constantly pursuing “sharp pressure”, and the scale of the venue is larger than one; and the curator also likes to make “platform” for the sake of design aesthetics and market efficiency. Super-large exhibition. This kind of information density, even if the professional audience stares at a piece of work, is only a short 17-24 seconds. Therefore, it is crucial to continuously improve the information dimension within the unit and reduce the cognitive anxiety of the audience.
Exhibition with LED screens, projections and animations, and even documentaries, to let the audience know more about the collection on the basis of text introduction, is nothing new. The new technology XR, which breaks the boundaries of time and space, naturally will not escape the blue eyes of the museum.
Unreal and Real: Museum’s XR Exploration
How XR helps people alleviate “museum fatigue,” and we’ve seen advanced exploration in many museums.
One of the least costly ways to reinvent the exhibition is to use the App on your mobile phone to enhance the content of the exhibition with augmented reality (AR) technology. Interactivity.
The Detroit Institute of Art at the Lumin Tour Show in 2017 used AR to display information about art, such as “X-rays” on an ancient mummy, allowing viewers to see its external and internal bones. The information that is hidden is helpful to understand the many unknown details of the cultural relics, which is difficult for traditional museums.
Beyond AR, you can use VR equipment to construct a virtual space, let the audience “immersively” traverse back to the past, “field” to feel the cultural style conveyed by the exhibition.
This experience can be easily grafted onto the original display through VR device and content development, which is almost standard for large museums.
The audience can cross the Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province and experience the 14,000-square-foot enamel archaeological site. They can also use the Samsung Gear VR to return to the Bronze Age at the British Museum to participate in ancient rituals such as the sacrificial sun. The footsteps of the workers, from the museum through the women’s tomb to dig the scene, to understand the process of cultural relics to open the history of dust, or directly into a painting, in a new way to feel the scenery of the artist’s pen, face-to-face with the people in the painting… …
(In the Dali Museum, visitors wear VR helmets into Dali’s paintings)
Of course, perhaps the passive acceptance of this knowledge is still boring, so interactive viewing may hit the hearts of free-style audiences.
The original cultural relics that can only be seen from afar can be played and appreciated. Perhaps it is the lifelong dream of many cultural enthusiasts. And such demand is becoming within reach with the advent of VR. The cultural relics are presented in a digital way, and there is no such problem as cultural relics damage, and the user can also taste the collection from different perspectives.
Google’s Cultural Institute project and the Natural History Museum in LondonWhen the library is difficult to guarantee the full 4G network, users have to wait for a long time when experiencing new technologies such as AR and VR, or they can watch the video in the frame of the frame. Naturally greatly discounted. At present, many museums have started the construction of “5G venues”, but this process requires the network infrastructure, mobile terminals, content development, etc. to be fully in place, and it will not be completed overnight, during which users will “get off the powder and step back”. It’s really hard to say.
In addition to the hardware itself, there may be a rudeness in the production of VR. In the previous section, we mentioned that it is not difficult to introduce the technical solution of VR in the museum. It is roughly that the exhibits are digitally documented through 3D modeling and other technologies. The deeper point is to visually reproduce under the line, which is a panoramic view. The picture adds hotspot information, exhibit content and other hot spots to achieve the effect of displaying details. However, the panoramic picture tends to have a fixed angle of view. When the interaction between different pictures, the jump between the different pictures will also cause obvious breakage. It is also easy to make people’s space confusing. Every click needs to find the location again. After the experience, the audience is likely to have a fog. Water, which may in turn aggravate “museum fatigue” may also be.
In fact, not only VR/AR, but also many new technologies introduced by museums such as robots and voice interactions are faced with various limitations in the initial stage. As long as the time is ripe, these major technologies will have a major breakthrough in the service capabilities of the museum, and it will inevitably sweep through each of us.
So, in the face of such long-term optimism and short-term difficulties, where can XR technology go in the future?
At present, the development of XR technology in museums is seeking breakthroughs in both directions.
One is to upgrade the rendering capabilities of hardware using technologies such as AI.
Artificial intelligence technology can be used on the basis of existing VR devices.Gain buff. For example, the problem of dizziness in the big problem is mainly due to the response delay of network transmission and image rendering, and refreshing to the different manifestations of the perception on the head, which will lead to dizziness. In addition to graphics card improvements on the hardware, the injection of AI algorithms is also the key to breaking through the hardware processing capabilities and display technology bottlenecks.
For example, through the optimization of machine learning algorithms, the delay of the picture is continuously reduced, and the problem of vertigo can be solved to some extent. LG collaborated with Sogang University to create an AI-driven algorithm that can reduce latency and motion blur by up to five times in VR content.
At the same time, the AI algorithm can also convert low-resolution video to higher resolution in real time, and can reduce energy consumption, which means that the cost of using VR may be further reduced, which will undoubtedly bring new features to the museum. imagination.
In addition to improving hardware performance, AI can help museums do more at the content level.
There are a large number of cultural relics in the museum that need to be digitally reconstructed through deep camera and 3D laser radar. In addition to the need to refine and non-destructively restore exhibit information, how to ensure that mobile terminals with different configurations and different languages can be stably and quickly Read the content you need through AR and VR devices?
This requires the use of an algorithmic model to “know the autumn”.
We know that in the dimly lit, reflective environment, the signal-to-noise ratio of the image captured by the camera will be relatively high, which makes the machine often unable to quickly and accurately identify the outside world, which is almost the daily state of the museum exhibition.
How to make AR/VR devices accurately recognize paintings and exhibits at different angles in the museum, and then display their attributes and artistic style to the audience. This requires a higher performance image recognition algorithm to escort. .
For example, Google has trained a machine vision engine that recognizes museum paintings by taxonomy, from Canaletto’s Venice Grand Canal.The exhibits make more potential people more interested in entering the museum.
(Works generated by the AI Portraits algorithm)
At present, the Harvard Art Museum, the Norwegian National Museum, and the Palace Museum have all begun to try to introduce AI into the museum renovation program. In the end, it will work with VR to change the life of several generations silently.
Some people say that VR and other pan-realistic technologies continue to innovate in museums. However, through some analysis, we find that the biggest value behind XR’s cool appearance is to provide an aesthetic way beyond traditional thinking. With the constant release of innovation and imagination, we can paving the way for the museum to thrive.