Possibilities in 360° with BeLink
The impact of COVID-19 and wider social and cultural shifts in 2020 are offering new opportunities for museums to be creative and adapt to new needs and requirements – for many this is has kick started a process of rapid development and digital transformation.
this exciting process involves finding new ways to bring visitors to your site, as well as creating new ways to take your site to them.
For us, this is also an opportunity for bringing together practitioners, artists and technologists with different skills and experience, to respond to these challenges with innovative ideas and experimentation, developing new ways to connect with your audiences – before, during and after their visit.
we are very pleased to announce a new collaboration with BeLink, specialists in 360° film and live streaming, interactive virtual tours, virtual and augmented reality.
“Our immersive 3D spaces and VR experiences, bring the captured spaces to life for everyone to view on their browser, desktop, tablet, smart phone or on a VR headset, for the full real-life experience.”
BeLink
Imagine the possibilities for self-guided and facilitated exploration and storytelling, on-site and online,
this new collaboration is bringing our digital thinking and interactive storytelling approaches together with BeLink’s 360° technical expertise, and the international masterplanning and interpretation experience of Tim Gardom Associates.
We’re excited by the unrealised potential of 360° technologies to support deeper and more integrated approaches to digital strategy, museum development and storytelling experiences for museums and cultural organisations – from ancient to digital.
what are some of the possibilities offered by virutal interactive tours, 360° film, live streaming and photography?
More importantly, what can they do for you?
Before we begin, here are a couple of important questions to answer for yourself, firstly:
What is your organisation seeking to achieve?
Tip: Allowing time for out of the box thinking, to explore and discuss different ways that a flexible virtual replica of your spaces might be useful, is essential.
Who are your existing audiences and how do you engage with them?
Who are the new audiences you hope to reach, why them, and who else is out there waiting for an opportunity to discover your story?
What do they know, what do they want to know, and how do they like to engage?
what do you have to use, show and tell?
Interactive virtual 360° replicas of your space and live streamed experiences can be incredibly versatile platforms for new forms of self-guided and facilitated storytelling and engagement.
They offer a new type of space for you to experiment with and discover new ways of connecting with audiences on-site and online.
For your audiences, they can be there/here with you, wherever they are.
Here are some of the approaches we’ve been developing that might work for you.
having a clear idea of what you want to achieve from the outset will enable us to plan the 360° recording process to ensure it captures all the data points that might be useful for you going forward.
On-Site
Pre-engagement: These 360° experiences are a great ways to engage with visitors and build anticipation before they visit your site in person.
Introducing people to your spaces, picking out highlights from your collections and stories, builds emotional and intellectual connections, and gives people incentive to visit in person and see the real thing.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, we’ve found that the more people know about you and what you have to show and tell, the more they will want to come and see it for themselves.
Reuse and Recycle: Your new digital replica of your internal spaces, and for those who have them, your gardens or external site, is not a single use object.
Layering interpretive and storytelling content within the experience enables you to use a single copy of your virtual tour to engage different types of visitor simultaneously.
You can scrub any // all content at any time to change the visitor experience and tell new stories.
You can also duplicate your 360° tour (creating multiple copies) that can be interpreted with different content designed to engage different core and target audiences, as well as for use in specific contexts, such as for education or community engagement.
Access: Let’s not forget about recording and interpreting spaces that are currently not accessible for any visitors because of health and safety reasons, or spaces that are never accessible to some visitors with different or complex needs.
these experiences are a great introduction, wayfinding and navigation tool for museums. These experiences are a great introduction, wayfinding and navigation tool for museums.
Legacy: A huge amount of time, energy and knowledge goes into creating your exhibitions, permanent and temporary.
why not record them and make them accessible for a much wider audience in new ways while they are in-situ, as well as preserving them for and sharing them with future generations?
This approach will help to ensure more effective legacy planning.
Recording your exhibitions captures some of that value that would otherwise be lost, as well as making these experiences and stories accessible for visitors in the future, staff and researchers, school groups and more.
connections across time and space
Museums and heritage sites, botanic gardens and other spaces are hubs connecting visitors to different moments in time and space – some are very local, some spread across a national portfolio, and others reach out across the world.
With 360 film, live straming and photography, as well as augmented and virtual reality, you can bring those places into your visitor experience, integrating them in relevant, engaging and accessible ways.
Imagine transporting your visitors from your egyptian galleries to the Valley of the Kings, or capturing incredible seasonal events around the world in 360°, such as cherry blossom season in Japan, and sharing them (as recordings or in real time) with visitors to your sites, gardens and parks.
In the future, when we can have hands on interactives again, these will make for great tactile in-gallery experiences. for now they make for compelling BYOD and virtual visitor experiences, that are naturally distanced but can be shared and interactive.
Off-Site
As we’ve said before, you can augment and interpret these versatile virtual environments in multiple ways to appeal to diverse online audiences.
You can use different voices and interpretive content to draw new connections between your story and your displays.
pre-recording a range of virtual walk through tours of your space, enhanced with voice overs and additional content, creates an evolving set of experiences to keep online visitors coming back for more.
Using facilitation, you can transform your virtual galleries into a real time classroom, supported with different types of curriculum-based resources, materials and activities.
Live streamed events might be right up your street.
using 360° film and live streaming, you could host, boradcast and record an evening concert or dramatic performance in your space, or invite celebrities to read ghost stories for Halloween nestled among the creepier items in your collections, for example.
you could begin running a series of regular and // or one-off live guided tours, led by people from different departments, fields of research, communities and cultures, speaking about what your collections and story means for them.
training and development
Interactive replicas of your site combined with your digital collections can become a great resource for museum development, a new medium for community engagement and co-creation, as well as a flexible and effective tool for education, outreach and programming.
You can analyse your current visitor experience and journey, showing how people move through your spaces, as well as the displays and stories they encouter along the way.
you can experiment with new types of content, a new Tone of Voice, as well as new visitor flows, by recording and embedding new audio, images, videos, and walking your teams through the experience you are proposing.
you can use your interactive virtual museum replica to lead workshops and community engagement sessions, to generate ideas and input, as well as to test ideas as they are being developed, embedding new content into the virtual space to gather responses and feedback, as well as using it to support different types of co-creative activity.
Digital thinking is all about exploring what ‘becoming more digital’ could mean for you and your audiences.
As storytelling people, we understand that museums connect us with the world’s most important stories: bringing the past to life - making sense of the present - imagining new futures.
Your organisation has a huge amount of existing capital, including bespoke tours, expert views, family and intergenerational storytelling, academic and specialists insights.
All this can all be adapted and used to enhance your visitor experience, programming, engagement and educational activities, as well as for developing new in-house skills, using 360° tours as their vehicle.
If you’re currently engaged in, or about to embark on, the process of developing your offer and becoming more digital, we’d love to hear from you, to find out what you’re up to and what digital transformation means for you.
you can give us a call or use the form below to get in touch.