Post Covid-19 Immersive Tours (for cultural venues) Act I.
While I was working for Cooperative Innovations, I wrote this article as a means of thinking critically about a really interesting project they are working on cura.tours. I hope my provocations here provide a starting point for anyone looking to explore this area.
Introduction
Immersive technologies are going to change the face of how we experience cultural and entertainment content outside of venues and I think the how and why is worth exploring.
In 2020, global lockdowns accelerated the conversation from having a digital activation as a secondary consideration, to being a primary one. Whether we go back to any semblance of normality, it’s critical to see that prior to
COVID-19, we were already at a point where immersive technologies had reached a significant level of maturity to become a key part of a cultural institution’s digital engagement strategy and that is not set to change.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that like anything, there are many different angles in play, a complex web of interplaying parts spanning human behaviour to consumer technology and commerce.
Envisioned as a multifaceted diamond, we have our audience and their increasing appetite for convenience & novelty – audiences of all ages are seeking novel experiences and on the other we have really good consumer technologies that can enable those experiences, of course these are being pushed by companies that have their own commercial agendas.
On the other quarters of the diamond, we’re seeing the first meaningful digitally native efforts from curators and interpreters, taking advantage of digitisation efforts beyond preservation and study, its enabling entirely new experiences and ways of interacting with a collection. Technologies are finally mature, expressive and accessible enough and the vocabulary for using them is shared amongst institutional content creators and the studios who work with them.
This article series attempts to unwrap some of this discussion above in 3 acts which dip into the Past, Present and Future of how we might use immersive technologies to fuel interesting tour like experiences for venues.
It’s not an exhaustive look, rather a meandering exploration of themes we could be looking at, things that come to mind and mostly from my perspective and a good deal of looking at the past.
On a personal note, although I have a huge love of this area, I’m signing out of cultural production and critique and casting my eyes on Automotive and how we move in my new role at Vital Auto in Coventry, if you’d like to be appraised of what I do there and across my other interests please sign up to my newsletter.
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ACT I — Let there be light.
Light as a form of immersive technology.
In 1890 the UK Government devoted £7,000 (just shy of <£1m adjusted for inflation at 3.6%) to the British Museum, to install electric lights. This was to allow them to open till 10:00PM every weekday evening. A newspaper of the time hailed it as ‘a boon to the working classes’ and after much fanfare it proved ‘a complete and gratifying success’.
It seems so alien to us now, yet it is so fundamentally important to understand how basic technology changed things and shaped perceptions up our present day context and how it paved the way for a new future and how basic today’s technology introductions will look in the long view.
Prior to the installation of incandescent lighting, ‘daylight’ was the only obvious source of light for the galleries, and although forms of artificial lighting existed (gas based and oil lights), they simply couldn’t use them in the British Museum due to fears of starting a fire.
If you think about what a venue, particularly a gallery does, it tries to magnify what is on display by providing the right environment for the display of artefacts and the contextual cues around them. In a historic context, poor lighting in winter and frequent fog would often force early closure of the galleries, so the introduction of lights was an innovation, borne out of necessity and a classic case of opportunity meets available technology. It allowed for an improvement in existing conditions to the point that going back would seem perverse. In order to experience the gallery in the best possible ‘light’ and immerse yourself in the exhibits, you had to install lights
Following the installation of the lights, the British Museum had a grand total of 530,172 visitors, that included (66,339 evening visitors and most curiously, a drop in daytime attendance to 463,833) , the net affect was around 15,635 new visitors.
An improvement in the form of a single digit percentage uplift in total visitor numbers (3%) from the previous year may not seem like much, and it is pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things, but it was higher nonetheless.
1889 = 514,536 (Daylight only)
1890 = 530,172 ↑ (Lights Installed)
1891 = 514,914 (Visitor numbers normalise)
Then they just keep going up…↑
Gradually over the next decade the figures rose by 30%,
and in 1900 (ten years after the introduction of these lights), they had 689,249 visitors.
When we look at cultural content consumption and experience, numbers only tell one side of the story, it could be that there were many other factors that influenced visitor figures. Without extending more tentacles into other areas, it is hard to say what the actual impact was. On this basis, you could argue that numbers are a really rubbish and pointless metric in terms of measuring or assessing cultural impact. You simply can’t fully account for the qualitative uplift or the accessibility improvements that occurred after the introduction of artificial lights.
These lights, were a form of immersive technology that did have a lot of impact and it shifted expectations. They dramatically improved the optical qualities of an in person experience and paved the way for other forms of experience which were telematic in origin. (ie starting with British Pathe, Gaumont news coverage of exhibitions on TV broadcasts and cinema reels, and if you could take the leap of a century, bringing up to present day immersive at home exhibition / tours which I will cover in this article).
I thought it would be good to attempt four takeaways in this act:
- Visitor figures and technology aside, it’s staggering to think that in less than 150 years we’re talking about forms of tele-presence and virtual presence, the ability to visit and experience a venue, its objects and stories, in as rich a way possible without being there. You could be on the other side of the world, experience an exhibition with others through a device from the comfort of your armchair. http://cura.tours is trying to do just that. Provide the most versatile offsite tour experience for visitors with a social dimension.
(full disclosure again in case you skipped the intro, that I was a consultant to the makers Cooperative Innovations).
Let’s say it for what it is, this would have been magical fantasy 100 years ago. - Convenience and novelty go hand in hand, all other experiential factors aside, if it’s acceptable and accessible, we would absolutely go for the option that also has some form of novelty at its core. I can absolutely make that assumption here just looking at the numbers, and happy to be corrected but as the British Museum numbers showed, it’s not outlandish to consider that the daytime visitors simply opted to go at night because they worked during the day, or maybe, just maybe they were curious to try out a new experience. If COVID-19 has shown all of us, although human experience and societal configuration is bound by physicality, the novelty aspect of an experience has always been very important. As consumers of cultural content, we crave social and sensorial experiences.
- Technology adoption and assimilation is slower than we’d like to think and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Incandescent light bulbs were widely available in the 1880s. Although the British Museum was one of the first public buildings in the UK to have them, it took them a while, till 1890 (10 years or so from mainstream adoption to implement).
Cue joke about how long it takes for museums to screw a lightbulb. — To bring it into a present day context, it has literally taken a pandemic, and the forced closure of venues for these conversations to suddenly become far more salient and effective in rapidly deploying and commissioning new XR digital activations for at home consumption. In my opinion however, they leave a lot to be desired, and they’re missing the mark, by a longshot… there are some crucial factors missing and there are so many under-explored avenues that I’ll cover in ACT II and ACT III. - Lastly, and this is quite important in my opinion, the technology itself ultimately wasn’t as important as its effect and what it enabled. The lightbulbs enabled something that was never quite possible before, and it became a substitute for something essential that was missing; in the British Museum’s case ‘daylight’. In other words a lot of technologies are redundant when a better alternative exists, unless there is something really special about the experience they generate. There’s not much you can do right now on a more immersive experience enabling technology that you can’t do with other forms of technology and maybe this is why the adoption is slower. Radio and Television all had their own hype phase, which lasted a good ten years from usable consumer mass consumer devices being available to being fully adopted, and as the technologies evolved, the technology itself was less relevant than the ways in which it was being used. We now barely care about these infrastructural technologies themselves as they’ve reached their state of maturity, and it’s all about the content they convey and the ways in which that content affects us.
