The Spatial Times - Augmenting Museums; from Art to Natural History
Museum exhibits are among the many fantastic use cases for Augmented Reality. Creating immersive and interactive exhibits, or adding an extra layer to already existing exhibits not only adds fun, but can increase the value and depths of understanding to everything from classical paintings to natural history exhibits or technical museums.
We’ve taken a look at AR exhibits from around the world and in this edition of the Spatial Times, we’re sharing some of the very best examples to inspire you.
An exciting thing is that not all of the examples are new, with the oldest being from 2017, so you can imagine that if we could have great AR exhibits 7 years ago, the possibilities today are even greater. And the price of setting up an AR experience in a museum today is a lot cheaper than it was just a few years ago.
Another exciting thing is, that while many of these experiences are served in an app, webAR has now come so far that you can create (almost) everything that you used to need an app for in webAR. This lets visitors access exhibits through a quick scan of their phone, without having to download an app or sign up for anything. This has been shown to increase the number of visitors that use the experience compared to experiences that are app-specific.
Let's explore the possibilities; read on.
Insights from the world of Augmented Museums
Let’s dive into some different examples of Augmented Reality that not only add to the museum experience in a visual way but also add immersion, depth of understanding and space for contemplation.
In 2017 Toronto-based digital artist Alex Mayhew took a series of classical Canadian and European paintings and made them come alive, bringing them into the 21st century with, amongst other things mobile phones, grocery bags and environmental pollution.
This exhibition used an app, but today’s advanced webAR lets you present the same kind of experience directly in the browser, using a tool like Hololink.
New Atlas wrote a nice article about the exhibition here: https://newatlas.com/reblink-augmented-reality-art/50450/
The National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France lets visitors revive extinct creatures by making the animals come alive in the visitors’ surroundings. By using a Microsoft Hololens visitors can walk around and experience them in immersive augmented reality.
The exhibition was opened in 2021 and is still live. Visit it if you’re in Paris! You can read more and buy tickets on the museum’s website here: https://www.mnhn.fr/en/experience/revivre-extinct-animals-in-augmented-reality
Also in Paris, the world famous Louvre museum partnered with Snap AR Studio to show the original colours and shapes of ancient Egyptian statues, reliefs and sculptures, bringing them to life in a way that hasn’t been seen for thousands of years.
The exhibition was created to be used with the snapchat app, but if you want to create a similar experience without having to use a specific app, webAR makes similar solutions possible.
You can enjoy the exhibition in Paris until the fall of 2024.
Read a short article about the exhibition and watch an interesting video here: https://newsroom.snap.com/da-DK/egypt-augmented
Amazing stuff built by Hololink Editor users
The Digital Concept Development students at Business Academy Aarhus have been working with the Hololink editor. They were given a series of cases and only 2 weeks to create 2 AR experiences, of which the second was for the famous ARos museum of modern art.
Read the case study below to learn about their task and their experience of using Hololink.
https://www.hololink.io/blog-posts-hololink/augmented-reality-design-at-business-academy-aarhus
AR example of the day
The Le Mans 24 Hour race is right around the corner, and we thought it would be fun to create an AR experience that gives you a little look into the world of Le Mans.
You can both see some Le Mans cars up close, get a feel of what the race track looks like from inside one of the cars and, not least, place a 3D model of the track on your own floor, with cars speeding around the track. The model was specifically made for us by the talented 3D animator Simas Alaune.
You can try the Le Mans experience at: https://lemans.hololink.app
Or scan the QR code:
Updates from the Hololink Blog
Creating cool AR solutions is one thing, but do you have a game plan for presenting your ideas to potential clients?
In this post we go through 5 important steps to think about when pitching and selling an AR experience.
New Hololink feature
Interaction is one of the key components of any interesting AR experience.
And while interaction can be as simple as moving from one step to the next, more advanced interaction would be to let your users trigger audio, animations, video, animations and object visibility when they want to.
This is exactly what you can do with our expanded action system.
Simply choose an action from the dropdown menu to let your chosen button, object or image trigger that action when tapped.
Getting Started with Hololink
When you're ready to publish your first AR experience, you don't want to break the bank, and we want to make it easier for you stay on budget.
This is why we've lowered the price on our Single subscription plan, which gives you all editor features, letting you publish a single Hololink with unlimited views.
The new price is €51/month if you go for the annual subscription, or €68/month if you opt for the monthly subscription.
You can subscribe directly in the Hololink editor.
That's all for this this edition of the Spatial Times.
We hope you've been inspired. And although there are quite a few other museum examples out there, they are far apart and admittedly of varying quality. So there's a good market for helping museums get more immersive by using spatial augmentation in a good way.
Get in touch if you have questions or suggestions and be sure to open the newsletter next month to learn more.
Have a great June!
The Hololink Team
