Playing Through the Glass: Digital Media, Collaboration, and Preservation at the Hunt Museum

There is a growing expectation that museums incorporate digital media to enhance the visitor experience and support deeper engagement with collections. Digital media presents significant opportunities for museums to collaborate, experiment, and innovate, allowing historic collections, object narratives, and digital representations to be used in ways that draw visitors “through the glass” to experience objects in new and playful ways. However, small museums in particular do not always have in-house expertise to create and maintain digital engagements. Over the last five years, the Hunt Museum has placed innovation and the development of its digital collection at the centre of its institutional strategy. This has resulted in an increase in 3D models and a wide range of digital assets and media, including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and other forms of digital visitor engagement tools. These initiatives have been created through a variety of funding streams and have been delivered, executed, and evaluated with varying degrees of success. The proposed paper presents the Hunt Museum as a case study to critically examine the production, use, and long-term implications of digital experiences. Drawing on specific examples of AR, VR, and interactive media, it explores the collaborative processes required to create interesting and playful digital content for museum audiences. It will look at experiences created through collaboration between staff at the Hunt museum and software developers from Noho, a Dublin based company producing digital experiences for cultural heritage contexts. The paper reflects on how decision-making, workflows, budget and outcomes can impact the success and otherwise of digital experiences at the museum. The paper discusses the successes but also the challenges encountered in creating digital content for museum visitors, including issues related to experimentation, sustainability, and learning from failure. It also considers the implications of these projects from a digital preservation perspective, highlighting the importance of developing appropriate methods for the maintenance and long-term preservation of interactive digital tools and experiences created for the museum.