Augmented Reality Is Transforming Museums Comment
This article posts interesting questions about the legitimacy of AR at public spaces, which is something that I didn’t think very much about before. In our class discussions before, we took perspectives of younger audiences who want the museum experience to be very adaptive and innovative. When I first thought about project ideas, I was thinking about using AR/VR to create virtual exhibitions outside of museum space, which corresponds to Shayna’s Snapchat lens related idea, but from the perspective of museums, it is not an easy decision to make. The concept of incorporating these technologies into museum experiences seems to be somewhat universal, but in general museums don’t seem to be enthusiastic about carrying out specific projects. When our project group had discussion with Chris, it seems that the past approaches made by the museum was still somewhat conservative, and that they just started to learn more about visitors, what their preferences are and how they want to engage with the museum. So a lot of the questions we had concerning visitors cannot be answered. Sometimes even when visitors respond positively to AR components in the museum, like “hacking the heist”, the museum didn’t seem very happy about it. Is it because there is still a fundamental difference between the museum and its audiences’ perception of what the purposes of museums are?