How Museums Adopted Interactive Art and Gamification to Survive the Pandemic and Reposition for the Future
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world off its feet and mass lockdowns ensued, museums were no exception to the challenging times ahead. According to a survey performed among museum directors across the United States by the American Alliance of Museums in June 2020, a third said either there was a “significant risk” that their museums would close permanently in the next 16 months, or they “didn’t know” if they would survive the pandemic. Almost 90% said they had 18 months or less of financial reserves remaining; 56% had just 6 months or less remaining. Reeling from such adverse conditions, some museums started incorporating gamification and interactive art to engage visitors. This article will investigate how museums’ finances and attendance were impacted during those tough pandemic years, and why a gamification strategy offers distinct advantages for helping to secure their future.
An Evolving Business Model?
During the pandemic, forced closures, reduced visitor numbers, and financial strains prompted museum owners to reassess their traditional business models. Nowadays, museums are not merely reopening their doors but are actively transforming their revenue strategies. The narrative has shifted from a heavy reliance on admission fees and donations to a dynamic exploration of innovative revenue streams. Museums are not only adapting to the new normal (lower attendance levels on average, higher operating costs) but are proactively redefining their financial landscapes to ensure sustainability and resilience in the face of future uncertainties.
Most museums have not seen a full recovery in visitor attendance in the post-pandemic era. According to the National Snapshot of United States Museums report, fielded in March-April 2023, one-third of museums have rebounded to pre-pandemic attendance levels, but two-thirds continue to experience reduced attendance, averaging 71% of their pre-pandemic attendance.
Financial recovery from the damage of the COVID-19 pandemic has been inconsistent across the museum world.
- 30% of responding museums have seen their net operating performance decrease as compared to 2019, with a median decrease of 20%.
- 39% of responding museums have seen their net operating performance increase as compared to 2019, with a median increase of 19%.
- 31% of responding museums have seen no change in their net operating performance as compared to 2019.
These financial trends are consistent across museums irrespective of their size or type.
The Case for Interactive Art and Gamification
In order to compensate for the loss of admission-based revenues without selling off their most prized cultural assets in 2020, many museums had to think creatively about possible new revenue streams. A potential avenue here was for museums to better cater to a digital-first audience and look for ways to monetize that audience. To be successful in this approach, digital offerings and digital distribution had to be compelling and attractive to these audiences. One way to achieve this end was to explore ways to increase those digital offerings’ social interactivity through gamification techniques, thereby increasing audience participation. More interactivity also created feedback loops, giving crucial insight into how well these offerings engage their audiences, and facilitating their ongoing evaluation, iteration, and improvement over time.
Efforts to gamify museum collections to attract audiences and increase audience engagement are not entirely new, and past examples of such efforts have attempted to leverage the best elements of the most successful video games. For instance, Tate Worlds, launched by the Tate Museum in 2015, used the Minecraft gaming platform to create a series of 3D maps, the 2017 live Reddit event “Place” allowed users to color in a single pixel every 5–20 minutes from a blank 1000×1000 pixel digital canvas, and the British Museum encouraged visitors to engage more with art by attaching QR codes with mini-quizzes to the artworks in 2019.
Gamifying museum collections is increasingly being seen as a potentially powerful way of making digital offerings more socially interactive and engaging. For instance, in the summer of 2020, Boston’s Museum of Science created Ask a Virtual Expert, an AI-powered experience that offered visitors an interactive exhibit featuring the digital version of Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University in Providence, R.I. Museum who answered the public’s questions on COVID-19. Another notable example is the Smithsonian Museum, which launched its Digitization Program in 2020 to improve its digital 3D offerings available to visitors who could peruse or download free 3D scans of everything from the Apollo 11 command module to a complete woolly mammoth skeleton.
One of the most recent examples of providing a highly interactive museum experience is the Media Museum in Hilversum (or the Institute for Sound & Vision). The museum recently reopened as a super-modern museum that continuously adapts to visitors’ actions through the creation of a personal journey by using a Museum app, facial recognition, and other AI-powered techniques.A counterpoint to the gamification strategy is that interactive experiences in the museum context are not always better than traditional touring experiences, do not have universal appeal, and in some cases, have proven to be confusing for participants. Museums can and do still derive immense value from the use of their physical spaces and artifacts to facilitate the quiet, contemplative, or moving experiences that they are traditionally known and loved for by audiences everywhere.
Holo-Museum and Extended Reality
A 2023 study exploring the use of gamification and extended reality in the cultural sector found that virtual guides and gamified approaches, incorporating both 3D and 2D technologies, appeared to be both effective and highly engaging for visitors. Virtual guides emerged as the most immersive, while gamification was the most motivational, with participants naturally assuming the existence of rewards. To cite two interesting examples that were launched in 2020, I’d mention the 360-degree virtual Van Eyck exhibition, created by the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent in Belgium and a VR game based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books offered by the V&A in London.
Perhaps Holo-Museum, launched in October 2021, is one of the most fascinating examples of how immersive technologies are revolutionising how museums can reach audiences — particularly younger ones. Holo-Museum, built using the magic touch of spatial reality technology, helps young visitors understand collections better when they eventually get to see them in person, sparks their curiosity and gets them excited about learning new things.
Moreover, immersive technologies are also an exciting way for museums to display their collections online, touching larger audiences all over the world, and to encourage their visitors to dive in deeper into the items in a collection.
A fascinating (perhaps even game-changing) case of immersive experimentation is the Morpheus Project kicked off by Perception in December 2021. As a part of this project, Perception has created a space similar to a metaverse for the National Science Museum in Thailand, allowing the visitors to interact just like they would if they were physically at the museum, bringing real-life experience into the digital realm.
Smartphone applications incorporating augmented reality technologies is one more pivotal medium within the extended reality (XR) museum ecosystem. Some studies have highlighted the advantages of such applications, emphasizing their cost-effectiveness and minimal maintenance requirements. These applications offer a range of experiences, from automated guides to augmented reality challenges, enhancing user experiences without burdening museums with excessive costs. The use of Google AR-Core demonstrated the potential to exhibit materials in virtual museums that may be limited in physical spaces, providing curators with unprecedented flexibility.
Augmented reality (AR) involves the use of technology, typically through smartphones or tablets and associated apps, to overlay images, text, or sounds onto the user’s real-world environment. Unlike virtual reality, which immerses users entirely in a different reality, AR supplements and enhances the existing environment by displaying an altered version alongside reality. AR experiences are easily accessible with just a smartphone or tablet, making them versatile tools for annotating scenes, providing additional information, and placing objects or scenes in context within the user’s current reality.
Since the pandemic, museums all over the world like Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in France, The National Museum of Singapore, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and many more have implemented AR installations in one way or another. For example, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, an AR app called “ArtLens,” was implemented to provide an interactive experience for visitors. When people aim the camera of their devices at the artwork, they can get further information, see related pieces, and even join interactive quizzes and games to better understand the art on show.
Conclusion
Leveraging interactive art and gamification to revitalize museums was not only about staving off the immediate economic crisis facing many museums in 2020. It was also crucial to help keep museums relevant and to continue to attract future audiences, especially to today’s younger, digitally native generation. With the implementation of extended reality projects and various gamification strategies, museums have not only increased their engagement capabilities, but provided more learning opportunities for visitors, and discovered new ways to leverage and showcase their collections to the public.
Author: Doron Fagelson,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt
Originally published on https://www.dataart.com/blog/
