Abstract
The primary mission of cultural institutions, including heritage sites and museums, is to perform and perpetuate Cultural Heritage (CH) by ideally transforming audiences into stewards of that heritage. In recent years, these institutions have increasingly turned to Mixed Reality (MR) technologies to expand and democratize public access to Cultural Heritage—a trend that is called upon to accelerate with COVID-19—because these technologies provide opportunities for more remote outreach, and moreover, can make partial remains or ruins more relatable to the public. But as emerging evaluations indicate, existing MR intangible and tangible Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) applications are largely proving inadequate to engaging audiences beyond an initial fascination with the immersive 3D visualization of heritage sites and artefacts owing in part to misguided storytelling or non-compelling narratives. They fail to effectively communicate the significance of Cultural Heritage to audiences and impress upon them its value in a lasting way due to their overreliance on an education-entertainment-touristic consumption paradigm. Building on the recent case made for Literature-based MR Presence, this article examines how the literary tradition of travel narratives can be recruited to enhance presence and embodiment, and further elicit aesthetic experiences in Digital Cultural Heritage applications by drawing on recent findings from the fields of Extended Reality (XR), cognitive literary science and new museology. The projected effects of this innovative approach are not limited to an increase in audience engagement on account of a greater sense of presence and embodiment. This approach is also expected to prompt a different kind of public involvement characterized by a personal valuation of the heritage owing to aesthetic experience. As the paper ultimately discusses, this response is more compatible both with MR applications’ default mode of usership, and with newly emerging conceptions of a user-centered museum (e.g., the Museum 3.0), thereby providing a narrative roadmap for future Virtual Museum (VM) applications better suited to the primary mission of transmitting and perpetuating Cultural Heritage.
Highlights
With the exponential uptake of consumer Virtual Reality (VR) technology since 2014, cultural institutions have increasingly turned to Mixed Reality (MR) applications to expand and democratize public access to Cultural Heritage (CH)
Recent findings have shown that existing MR intangible and tangible digital cultural heritage applications by and large fail to adequately engage audiences beyond an initial fascination with the immersive 3D visualization of cultural sites and artefacts
This paper offers a rare challenge to the widespread and enduring assumption that didactic content packaged in an entertaining form—as captured by the notion of “edutainment”—and disseminated via touristic channels is the most effective means of transmitting and perpetuating Cultural Heritage to diverse local and international audiences
Summary
With the exponential uptake of consumer Virtual Reality (VR) technology since 2014, cultural institutions have increasingly turned to Mixed Reality (MR) applications to expand and democratize public access to Cultural Heritage (CH). When it comes to Mixed Reality applications, the suggestion here is that by engaging the sensorium not directly stimulated by these technologies (which remain primarily visual and auditory media) by way of simulation, and by amplifying actual stimuli, mental imagery can augment these technologies’ impact by means of content-based triggers It is no wonder as Starr remarks, that: “Multisensory imagery, especially the multisensory imagery of motion, is centrally important to a variety of aesthetic pleasures in part because it gives us access not to the “real” complexity of experience but to certain powerfully connected aspects of the ways our minds internally represent experiences and objects.” (Starr, 2013, 91) As suggested, sensory imagery is linked to embodiment and social interaction (as seen in the case of motor imagery). It essentially opens the possibility of recruiting the user’s attention and personal transformation towards the creation of incremental value for Cultural Heritage
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