Building mixed reality digital versions of cultural visits/exhibits

Abstract

The virtualization of cultural activities has the potential to improve visits to museums or galleries, leading to increased visitor participation and collaboration. Cultural institutions need tools to facilitate creation and modification of virtual exhibits, using digital representations of real-world artefacts. The framework presented in this paper tackles these issues, using two extended reality applications and a third exhibit editor application. The first application immerses the user in remote visits, including commenting and annotating activities. The second is a smartphone application to digitally augment the onsite visitor experience, also streaming a camera perspective to the virtual environment. The exhibit editor application, aimed at museum/gallery personnel, allows to create, open, and save virtual exhibits, containing 2D and 3D artworks, which can be imported from local storage. The digital exhibit is organized in a virtual room. These exhibits can then be viewed in the existing virtual platform's Oculus Quest VR application. This framework is intended to benefit both visitors and curators, by providing access to improved virtual exhibits, as well as a workflow that allows for easy creation and modification of Virtual Reality Museum exhibits that does not require previous computer experience.