A PIONEERING “mixed reality” project led by the University of Glasgow is allowing people to create their own virtual museums and giving them access to thousands of original artefacts to explore for the first time.
The Museums in the Metaverse project allows visitors and researchers to gain access to museums, sites, and objects that they wouldn’t usually be able to access using Meta’s MR headsets.
By using the headset people are able to access items that are usually not accessible, while being able to preserve them as experts explained there are a large number of artefacts that cannot be shared with the public due to their delicate nature, light-sensitivity, or because they are used predominantly for research purposes.
Developers behind the project also hope they can bring large collections which are too big to display into the “hands” of people virtually while giving them the opportunity to build their own personal museum collections.
BBC historian, Lucy Worsley (below), was able to experience the technology firsthand when she created her own museum dedicated to Mary Queen of Scots.
Retelling her first experience using the headset Worsley said: “I was gobsmacked. It's just so amazing.
“I would defy anybody to go into the museum for the first time without their jaw dropping.”
The historian, who knows a thing or two about museum collections as she is the joint chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, was able to explore a wide range of objects from different collections virtually.
“It was almost scary,” said Worsley. “Particularly when I accidentally maximised a death mask and it was just really huge.
“It was like being in a science fiction film. It was spinning around slowly in this darkness and Mary Queen of Scots' dead blank eyes were staring at me.”
The TV presenter explained that among the collection there were tiny items like a Victorian snuff box which was the size of a coin and there were entire buildings like Linlithgow Palace which you can walk around in.
“Despite having lived in Glasgow, I've never been to the Linlithgow Palace,” she said.
“Here I was able to have it in the palm of my hand and you can kind of walk around inside it, and then you can also fly yourself up and see it from different angles.”
The 3D mixed reality headset allows people to not only interact with objects, but they can also make them smaller or larger and spin them around in their hands.
Built inside the Unity games engine the technology offers “exceptional” realistic visuals as the software renders the objects accurately 60 times a second, calculating the changes in light reflection on the object while people interact with it.
The team at the University of Glasgow uses high-end digital SLR cameras, mounted on robotic arms, to capture hundreds of images of any given object.
The photographs are then run through a program that infers the 3D structure of the object from the pictures and builds the model.
“I think it's really cool for lots of different reasons, partly because you can handle and get close to things that you just wouldn't be able to in real life because they'd be too precious or they'd be in storage or there'd be conservation issues,” Worsley said.
“I know from being a museum curator that what you really want is people getting access to your collection.
“So, it's a way of allowing that.
“It's not the real thing, but it's a different way of accessing the real thing.”
Three organisations have partnered with the university, National Museums Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland, and The Hunterian, to help create a digital collection for people to explore.
The project was inspired back in 2017 by the closure of the Burrell with the collection not being available to the public for around five years and was able to secure funding through the Levelling Up Innovation Accelerators programme from the UK Government in 2022.
A spokesperson for the University of Glasgow said: “More than 90% of objects in collections, this is an average from collections across the whole globe, are in storage, many of which will never be on display.
“Being able to use technology to unleash that cultural potential seemed worthwhile on its own.”
Worsley explained one of the advantages of the Museums in the Metaverse project is that you can mix objects from different collections together, helping to create your own story.
“The objects can talk to each other and have a new sort of relationship that they haven't traditionally had,” she said.
The historian explained it could be used to get a new generation of people interested in history and could potentially interest people who might feel excluded from museums.
“I think it's really fruitful for perhaps introducing collections to people who would never go to a museum.
“For people that don't want to go to a museum. It's not for them.
“They feel excluded from museums.
“Perhaps it's a way of bringing them into our history tent.
“Our history is very big, anyone's welcome in our history tent, but not everybody feels that they're welcome.
“The sort of history that I'm interested in is history for people who don't know that they like history yet.”
