Museums in the Metaverse

This project will create a two-sided Museums in the Metaverse platform empowering online visitors to explore vast cultural assets in engaging new ways; enable novice and expert curators to create new content; and explore models of use to support sustainable economic and cultural growth. Virtual museums can escape the physical and geographical constraints that curtail traditional museums. Those constraints limit exhibitions to less than 10% of the objects that are held in collections, and limit audience reach by cost, distance, and accessibility. What is more, audiences appear willing to spend significantly (more than 50% of the cost of a traditional visit) for a high-quality virtual experience. The case in favour of virtual museums is strong, but there are challenges around costs, access, and audience that stymie their proliferation. Our project seeks to address these challenges with a two-sided Museums in the Metaverse (MiM) platform to unlock the vast, untapped, cultural and economic potential that virtual museums offer. One side of the proposed platform is for visitors who gain access to a rich array of museums, objects, and novel and dynamic exhibitions. The other side is for virtual curators. That is where experts and novices alike can build enriching, or just plain entertaining, narratives using objects and venues that have never been -- perhaps could never be -- placed together in the real world. This platform approach lowers costs and catalyses sustainable, user-driven, growth. The University of Glasgow is uniquely placed and equipped to anchor this project. We have a global reputation for digital humanities, museum studies, and digital cultural heritage, our own world-renowned Hunterian collection (which has been recognised by the Scottish Government as "Nationally Significant"), and partnerships with the leading collection holders in our own country, and more abroad. We also have a track record in fundamental research on, and application of, XR (extended reality) technology such as VR and AR. Our ARC-XR lab resources represent an extraordinary £1.8m internal investment in support of, and creating a unique venue for, projects such as MiM. We have also already helped build another successful two-sided XR platform for education: Edify. The Edify platform was the product of a collaboration between the University and a Glasgow-based SME (Sublime, now Edify) through the UKRI-funded Project Mobius. The MiM project draws on that success, and quite literally builds upon the Edify platform, to lead this inevitable cultural breakthrough from Glasgow, and for Glasgow.