This is the first instalment of a weekly review of all things digital. Each week we will look at a different digital application or technology and review it, thinking specifically about how this could be used by the museums in Cornwall.
As Digital Coordinator for CMP, I’m keen to find, and test-drive, new and different technologies, working out which ones will be useful for museums in Cornwall. Over the course of these reviews, we will also be handing devices and gadgets to a selection of museums to be tested by staff and volunteers.
Our primary focus is on low-cost or free applications that can be used with minimal effort and specialist knowledge. Each review will be given a score out of 20 and will be judged against four criteria: 1. cost, 2. ease of use, 3. educational benefit, and 4. fun! Within these reviews will look at the equipment needed, pros and cons and our general feedback.
We hope that through these reviews, you will get an honest and practical insight into how these technologies can be used within your museums, as well as providing achievable ideas!
If there is anything specific you would like us to test and review, or if you are interested in testing anything yourselves, please email me at jennylee@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk
Google Arts and Culture is an online platform for museums, art galleries and cultural institutions to display their images online. This also includes Google Streetviews inside museums and virtual tours – it is the virtual tour element that we are trying out this week. In future weeks we will review the other areas of this app.
This initial review of the virtual tour element of Google Arts and Culture looks at how immersive and easy to use these tours are, with a view to creating virtual tours of Cornish museums. In a future week we will review how easy it is to create your own tour, but for this week we are focussing on participating in a tour as a visitor.
In order to test out these virtual tours we used a Google Cardboard; these are available for under £10 and can be purchased easily from Amazon (see equipment list below). Google Cardboard instantly transforms your smartphone into a virtual reality viewer.
For the purposes of this review, we selected two different virtual reality tours; (i) The Peacock Room, Washington DC, USA, and (ii) Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. We were keen to see how these could be used within museums in Cornwall, so we picked tours that presented a similar environment.
We have separated this cons section into two to reflect the different tours that we tried:
Peacock Room Washington, USA
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed this immersive experience – so much so that we made some involuntary ‘oooh’ and ‘wow’ noises when we put the Google Cardboard on for the first time! We were glad that we tried out two different tours, as this revealed that not all virtual tours are created to the same standard. We much preferred the Dulwich Picture Gallery tour as it provided a much more immersive environment and made us want to visit so we could see the paintings up close.
Jenny Lee and Yiota Liopetriti