How the British Museum Uses VR to Increase the Learner Experience

This past weekend the British Museum expanded it’s teaching horizons to include using Virtual Reality. It’s not the first time a museum has done this using Samsung’s Gear VR headsets and likely won’t be the last.
As a child I spent many, many hours in museums, forts, castles, pretty much any kind of cultural institution. So, I know it’s hard to get excited about ceremonial bracelets of the Bronze Age, you sort of glaze over. But if you can be transported back in time and feel like you are there, then the information becomes an experience.
To create this special experience Education Managers at the British Museum Samsung Digital Discovery Centre used 5 Gear VR headsets, 2 Note tablets and an immersive dome with an interactive screen. There are 3 stations in all and each one displays a prehistoric roundhouse environment housing 3D scans of objects in the museum’s European Bronze Age collection, which have various ways as to how they are used.

It’s difficult to teach prehistory like the Bronze Age but with VR you can take audience engagement to a whole new level. Undoubtedly, we will see museums using VR more and more as technology advances and museums continue to search for new ways to engage and enlighten their audiences. It’s really kind of a perfect match, using technology of new to teach knowledge of old, the nerdy part in all of us can appreciate that. For more information check out the British Museum blog post.