Wherever you bring the game, you can have your very own museum in the pocket.

Due to the COV-19 epidemic, museums and art galleries are not able to open their doors to the public. This has a serious impact on the museums’ ticket revenue and public exposure. This issue is significantly important when museums are heavily reliant on donations from nonprofit organizations, and public exposure is a great measure to determine the amount.

Before Nintendo Switch, many of the museums had never imagined that the gaming industry could redefine the value of a museum. Due to the high exposure of the game “Animal Crossing”, many museums began to use this game’s built-in functions to carry out virtual exhibitions on the cloud. The freedom, personalization and contextualization made a game the best storyteller for exhibitions and museum collections. In short, the gaming industry is providing museums and art galleries with a new way to present themselves.  

“An increasing number of museums are seeking innovative solutions to better exhibit and communicate the tangible and intangible heritage they preserve while engaging visitors in an educational yet leisurely experience.”

When gaming became a symbol of many people’s lives, personalization, imagination and communication have advocated gaming to become part of the business. How can museums integrate the methods and concepts of gaming into the museum business-strategies effectively? This is a core question that requires an answer. Will the differences between art galleries and museums affect the way they implement gaming into their business? Moreover, how can gaming become a part of the museum visiting experience and how can visitors benefit from the game? This is not about simply using a game in an exhibition setting but actually building up an exhibition or even an entire museum floor on the cloud via a gaming setting.

Monterey Bay Aquarium (California, USA), the first museum to take the leap and use the game “Animal Crossing” to provide public education. This world-renowned aquarium, which opened in October 1987, owned 300,000 living species in a building with 30,000 square meters.

After “Animal Crossing” was released to the public, Monterey Bay Aquarium was one of the first to go live on the Nintendo Switch. During the live stream, it provided a general education session about natural science. Afterwards, it collaborated with the Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH) in Chicago to give a fossil tour in the museum inside the game. It also offers its professional opinion on whether the islands in the game will experience any geographical movement or not.

The museum does not only store its collection in a digital way inside a gaming space, but more importantly, the participant can control the museum curation process, and connect their digital life with the exhibition online. It means they can visit an exhibition with their friends, share artwork or even bring a copy back to their digital house. They can do anything with the exhibition that they can do in reality, and even more.

It is also worth mentioning the Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils in the Owl Museum of the “Animal Crossing” were a prototype of “SUE”, which is the best-preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil in the world to date, collected and maintained by the Field Museum of Natural History. It reflects the fact that the virtual museums in the game can cross-connect its digital and real identities with the visitors. The visitors are the same. They are also able to connect with the museum both in the digital space and reality. Thus, gaming is forming a closer connection for both when its digital identity is comprehensive enough to create meanings. Among them, 3D modelling and virtual reality are just a means of reaching this realization.

As “Animal Crossing” gradually became popular, more museums became involved. These included the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museums in the United Kingdom. These museums released their respective QR codes through the Nintendo Switch Online App, enabling visitors to transfer photos of these artworks or cultural relics to the game through one of its functions.

It is undeniable that museums games, as a popular and powerful storytelling method, are worthy of learning from museums and art galleries. The museums’ successes with “Animal Crossing” is due to the freedom and personalization of the game.

What if everyone could be a curator?

Curators need many characteristics, including a certain level of expertise in the field and clear logic. But at the same time, the museum community does not completely deny that visitor-led exhibitions are also a space for development. More importantly, would the world be different if everyone becomes curator? We are certain that the museum industry could make this a reality.

In a way like “Animal Crossing”, a large number of museum collections can be digitized through 3D technology and be stored in the cloud. Through providing a free virtual space for the public, attendees can invite friends or netizens to visit their exhibition space via an invitation code. It should be an interesting topic that deserves further discussion. In such a case, the only media that can provide such high transmissibility is gaming.  Games provide both a virtual space for exhibitions and the ability to share all contents with digital friends or online communities. This is important for the virtual exhibition.

How does 3D technology participate in the gamification aspect of museums and art galleries?

In general, three-dimensional and virtual reality can provide essential grounds for gamification for museums. In general, virtual museums can be produce via two main ways.

For virtual exhibitions that are created based on a real-world existing exhibition, 3D tech company can scan the exhibition scenes and works and simultaneously store image data and measurement data into the cloud-based virtual asset management system (MG Data Tech). Therefore, the curator or audience of the museum can design their exhibition based on the original exhibition.

However, a completely digitized virtual exhibition that is built only on the cloud may be more popular. Museum groups can scan collections from several museums and store digital copies in the cloud. Visitors can become curators by themselves, select artwork from the digital database and further showcase it through a CGI light-source setting.

The museum’s successes in Animal Crossing is not just a symbolic moment but emphasises the importance of adopting multimedia and digitalisation. On one hand, such a combination can enable games to achieve more and widen their boundaries. Alongside this, it can effectively attract more people to engage with the museum industry.

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Author: Christiane Zhao

In the past few years, the Chinese government has invested in the museum industry, building up more than 5000 museums which is a 1400 percent increase compared to the last 40 years. But this good story might come to an end due to the coronavirus outbreak and other influential factors. The Chinese economy is slowing down and the Chinese government is expected to cut its funding for the museum industry. The museums were planning to seek extra funding to support their daily operations, while trying to prove their value to the government.

Unfortunately, there is more bad news. The younger generations are showing greater interest in social media and live streaming, rather than their ancient heritage or traditional Chinese clothes that sit in the museums. For the museums, there is nothing more difficult than convincing citizens to visit the museum and support the museum store to boost their revenue. Museums do not only need to increase their ability to interact with new audiences, but also face challenges to produce high quality exhibitions with a limited number of available collections.

For these reasons, the museum industry in China is focusing on virtual exhibitions, or more specifically, exhibitions that are built on 3D modelling and rendering.

In past years, the increased use of multimedia techniques and virtual reality methods created a new form of presentation for museums’ exhibitions: virtual exhibitions. Virtual exhibitions are acknowledged as a unique and complementary way for the museum to promote their brand. It is not only because it can overcome the limits of time, location and space restriction, but also because hypermedia and multimedia are becoming the main portal for museums to promote their brand and increase visits. In the past, many museums in China tried to present virtual exhibitions by listing a collection of work on their websites, but the feedback was not great. However, 3D technology and model-rendering enable a realistic presentation of work via a person’s smartphone.

While it is widely known that the existing 3D technology is often good enough to trick our minds into believing it to be real, virtual exhibitions are not just a digital copy of a traditional exhibition. More importantly, how can virtual exhibitions reshape the brand of a museum, and how can it achieve things that traditional exhibitions cannot achieve?

Virtual exhibitions can provide an interactive experience beyond that of a traditional exhibition. Virtual exhibitions can be composed of text, image, video, voice, 3D model, virtual reality and other multimedia. Attendees can access and view the 3D model of a piece of work via the mobile phone at any time, in any place. Through clicking and rotating, attendees can observe the collection in full 360 degrees, unrestricted by a glass window or balustrade. It also means the attendees can understand the exhibition from a completely new direction through interactive activities such as games. The museums can adjust their content to satisfy the market-need or translate content according to the audience. Even more interactively, museums such as the Whitney Museum in New York provides two-sided information exchanges during their exhibitions, recording visitors’ comments and displaying them as part of the exhibition.

Many museums believe that exhibitions which enable information exchange is an essential criterion for a good exhibition. It means the attendee is no longer an anonymous individual, but somebody that can bring an impact to the exhibition, or even the wider population who visited the museum. In order to promote the museum’s brand and encourage more people to visit the museum, it is necessary to let the audience know their voice matters and their values can affect the meaning of an exhibition. Of course, this cannot happen when the virtual exhibition is fully based on imagination. In order to achieve two-way information exchange, it is necessary for a virtual exhibition to apply 3D technology and rendering to make virtual settings seem real, or at least relatable to a real-life context. When the attendee is able to link the virtual exhibition with their real-life experience, they are able to consider it at a deeper level and are expected to produce better thoughts and feedback.

The idea of applying 3D technology in a virtual exhibition is to reduce its limitation of providing “unreal” content while empowering the attendees to view, interact or even change the content of the work. When the person is a part of the exhibition, they are also touching that exhibition, leaving their own personal marks. Since the concept of enabling visitors to “edit” the traditional exhibition isn’t entirely new, some ask why a virtual exhibition is essential in promoting this concept today. It is true that many traditional museums provide some form of interaction in their exhibitions, but that interaction is always limited. The traditional exhibition can only be represented in the form of photos or videos, but virtual exhibitions enable the attendee to interact with 3D models in virtual and augmented reality.

More importantly, any interaction in a virtual exhibition is inherently different from a traditional exhibition. Virtual exhibitions provide a completely new way to explore and search for new information within a space without physical limits. In such circumstances, attendees are limited to their senses of light and color. There are museums which employ a professional 3D technology team to scan and build up 3D models for collections and render them to look real in a virtual exhibition setting. These factors do not only guide them through the exhibition but also influence how they reshape the exhibition.

Virtual exhibitions also enable greater collaboration than the traditional exhibition. It is not limited only to the attendees and the collection of work, but also offers exchanges between museums, or between curators. In a traditional curation setting at a Chinese museum, curators always define the theme of an exhibition based on the collection of work they currently have at hand. Not only does this caused pressure to these large, famous institutions, but especially the smaller and medium-sized museums that have just established themselves within the past few years.

Virtual exhibitions can change this.

Virtual exhibitions only require the curation team to borrow or lend the digital form of a historical collection. The curator can even combine their own collection with some new work to form an entirely new virtual exhibition, thereby increasing its exposure. It means that museums located far away from the city center, or those with limited collections, are able to more effectively promote their brand online because their virtual exhibition contains one or two famous painting or sets.

In addition, virtual exhibitions encourage museums to build up a virtual community for visitors to interact with, share or even consume exhibition-related products in their social groups. In recent years, the younger Chinese generation is adopting this new culture in tracing pop-idols. The virtual community is the main way to encourage people to spend money to support these public figures virtually. Now is the perfect time for Chinese museums to learn and adopt such a business model. Through virtual exhibitions, museums can promote famous IPs and direct virtual attendees to visit their online store.

In short, China is entering a new era that is heavily reliant on multimedia and mobile devices. It is also true that museums and galleries are facing competition from other social media or entertainment portals. It is known that the business model for Chinese museums is completely different from those of museums in the Western world. A virtual exhibition should not only be categorized as a digital form of traditional exhibitions, but an entirely new sector for museums to explore.

Author: Christiane Zhao