Today is Museum Day. Museums play an essential part in educating people about the past to make a better future. Museums are also one of the many to take a hit from the pandemic.
In honoring the history and looking towards the new, here is a collection of immersive museum experiences for you to appreciate the vital work museums do!
Manors of Kouvola in augmented reality
Kouvola city museum Poikilo exhibits the life in Kouvola, Finland, starting from the 17th century in its newest exhibition, Manors of Kouvola. The daily lives and the festivities at the noble manors peek through from the times passed into today.
The exhibition also features an augmented reality route. The visitors get to see a glance from the history of Kymenlaakso and its people brought into today.
The exhibition's objective is to show the Kouvola area's vivid history through more than twenty manor houses and their intriguing stories. A manor is more than its glorious facade. It is the wholeness of land, livelihood, and life stories of the people.
Read more here.
The glory of Egypt shines again in AR
We rarely get an opportunity to explore the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Even more rarely, we can immerse ourselves in them. Today we can.
Amos Rex is a museum where the past, the present, and the future meet. In 2020 the museum exhibited the foundation of our society: the glory of Egypt. A never-before-seen experience, a virtual ancient tomb, sends visitors off on a journey thousands of years back in time.
Egypt of Glory – The Last Great Dynasties is an exhibition taking the visitors on a journey back in time thousands of years to the Egypt of pharaohs. The rich culture found in archaeological excavations is still present in our everyday lives: the 365-day calendar and its division into 12 months were already used in ancient Egypt.
Ancient Egyptians' groundbreaking innovations - annual cycle, worldview, religion, and state structure - travel into the present in an exhibition, where the past and the future blend together. The mix of yesterday and tomorrow is presented through the technology of today: AR.
Read more here.
Fiskars Village's history brought into today with AR
Fiskars Village and museum area in Raseborg, Finland, have started their summer season once again. For Fiskars Village is home to over 500 people besides being a tourist sighting, they wanted to tell the Village visitors more about the buildings, the people, and the history of the area.
They decided to take their storytelling to another level, and AR was their weapon of choice. Together, we created the Fiskars Village Heritage Walk.
The Fiskars Village Heritage Walk was created with AR video content, placed in four guide signs around Fiskars Village. The videos take the visitors back to the 19th century Fiskars Village.
The objective of creating AR content into the guide signs was to give more information about the Village buildings and its history and people to the visitors.
Read more here.
HALO Open Art Studio brings art experience right to your living room
The municipality of Tuusula in Finland took a step towards virtual cultural experiences. Together, we created an augmented experience of Halosenniemi, the atelier home of the artist Pekka Halonen. The AR experience, HALO Open Art Studio, was opened to the public on June 17th of 2020.
Halosenniemi is a place on the shore of Tuusula Lake in southern Finland that offered ideas and inspiration to the artist Pekka Halonen in the early 1900s. Halonen is one of the most beloved artists of the Golden Era of Finnish art. He absorbed the international trends and applied them to the depiction of Finnish nature, for what Tuusula Lake was the ideal surrounding.
Halonen's studio opened to the public in the 1950s as a museum dedicated to Pekka Halonen and his life and art. In 2020, the studio took a step into the future, as the AR experience HALO Open Art Studio.
Read more here.
Digital museum is improving preservation and accessibility with AR
A new digital museum service Digimuseo has launched in May of 2020. Digimuseo aims to make museum content available in an inspiring and safe digital environment and be a user-friendly platform for all consumers and museums.
Up until now, museums in Finland have had varying digital services, depending on their resources. Digimuseo brings a much-needed tool to equal possibilities on preservation and accessibility.
The goal for Digimuseo is to promote and develop museum activities and collaboration, along with digital preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage.
Digimuseo is there for both consumers and museums themselves. It offers museum services in a safe space for all to visit, regardless of time and place, and provides the technology needed for museums to operate on a digital platform.
Read more here.
Art museum uses AR for time travel
Amos Rex aspires to be an art museum where the past, the present, and the future meet. To immerse visitors in a time travel to the past, they made use of the future - augmented reality.
The AR Flashback experience is p
aving the way for future AR campaigns and content to come.
Art museum Amos Rex wanted to create their first AR experience at the beginning of 2019, paving the path for augmented reality to become an integral part of a museum experience.
It was natural for the AR content to have the same theme as a museum that prides itself on where the past, the present, and the future meet.
Read more here.
AR gave new life to famous frescoes
Tove Jansson's works are among the most cherished pieces in the HAM, Helsinki Art Museum collection. The two breathtaking frescoes that form part of this experience are each over five meters wide and two meters tall.
To enhance these classic art pieces, we brought fashion journalist Sami Sykkö and nature journalist Minna Pyykkö to explore the frescoes. With seamless interactions available in multiple languages, museum visitors could understand a little more about Tove Jansson's iconic works.
Read more here.
Helsingin Sanomat highlights refugee crisis with AR
What happens after a devastating turning point in life? Can evil be forgiven? Finnish photographer Meeri Koutaniemi and Finnish producer Arman Alizad exhibited a series of documentary photos giving people an insight into sufferings around the world.
Together with Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and their design lead, Sami Valtere, we created an AR infographic to accompany the exhibition. We wanted to dig deeper into the global refugee situation.
Read more here.
Art beyond the frame
Classic paintings that are known and loved by everyone can often be taken for granted. Sometimes they need a lift to remind the audience why they indeed are iconic.
Arilyn helped to expose the world beyond one of Finland's most iconic paintings. When scanned with the Arilyn app, the painting appeared around the user in a 360-degree panorama, providing a more colorful and involved experience.
A classic piece of art by Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, "Lemminkäinen's Mother" (Lemminkäisen äiti), from 1897, was brought to life at the Finnish National Gallery Ateneum. The artwork and what lies beyond its frame opens around the viewer for an immersive atmosphere. Experiencing the art in augmented reality differs significantly from a traditional viewing of the art.
Read more here.
Extended reality is a tool to enhance the museum visit. XR can bring history to life in a way that feels natural to future generations.
