A virtual museum installation for time travel

Abstract

This work discusses the methodology for the design, development and deployment of a virtual 19th-century Fish Curing Yard as an immersive museum installation. The museum building now occupies the same space where the curing yard was over 100 years prior, hence the deployment of a virtual reconstruction of the curing yard in a game engine enables the museum visitors to explore the virtual world from equivalent vantage points in the real world. The project methodology achieves the goal of maximising user experience for visitors while minimising cost for the museum, and focus group evaluations of the system revealed the success of the interaction-free design with snackable content. A major implication of the findings is that museums can provide compelling and informative experiences that enable visitors to travel back in time with minimal interaction and relatively low cost systems.