Enriching collections with immersive technology

good morning and welcome to our webinar today enriching collections with immersive technology um i'm linda kobe and i'm the moderator today and i'm going to set the scene for you and and put and organize and guide you through the webinar so the webinar is brought to you by the space and then this slide tells you a little bit about the space who we are and what we do and in essence we're the uk's digital commissioning and development agency for the arts and cultural sector and the content of the webinar today is really three brilliant case studies from work um work by organizations who we have supported in their use of immersive tech and so we're going to here as i said three case studies today i'll just give you a flavor of what they're going to be firstly um we'll hear from louise stafford who's the director of learning at the national holocaust center and museum talking about their project forever online which she will say more about and then our second case study is um an audio project cornish tales a collaboration with the cornwall museum's partnership and the case study is brought to you by claire freeman who's an audio consultant and also rob lindsey our head of programming and then uh just a five minute break so you can take us moment from the screen and have a think about some of the questions and issues and whether there's other questions that you want to ask and then we'll return with paul long who's the director of mbd um an immersive storytelling organization and he's looking at their collaboration with the herbert art gallery museum heritage stories then we've got some time with all of the panelists for the kind of bigger overall questions and anything that we haven't covered so far um the things the practical issues to tell you about are that we use the chat option a lot both for um specific questions if there's something that you want to ask one of our panelists and put your questions into chat and it's a good opportunity for you to say hello to each other find out who's on the call and then have discussions as well and useful links and sharing goes on in there as well we have claire hill with us she's our live captioner and um claire will be working alongside the speakers so if you would like captions go to the bottom of your screen and select that option and thirdly we record the session so that if anybody wants to see it afterwards they can do so and it'll be on our youtube channel for a period of some months afterwards um and lastly at the end of the session we'll ask you to fill in an evaluation that's really quick just a few questions but of course those evaluations really help us to understand what works what doesn't and keep on bringing um webinars to you so that's our practical background and to start with kick off rob lindsey our head of programming is going to give you a sense of why this matters to the space some of the sort of important considerations when collection owners and museums are thinking about using immersive tech with their with their uh objects and and their artifacts well fantastic thank you very much linda and hello everyone um uh welcome today it's really great to see you all here um yeah as linda was saying the space were originally set up in order to help the arts creative heritage cultural sectors connect their offers to audiences through digital means that might be online it might be offline it might be live it might be captured it can take all sorts of different forms certainly the case studies that you're going to see here today have taken very very different forms as well and projects that have been right for the organizations at that moment in time projects that have been right for the pieces that were being offered to audiences to viewers to visitors and certainly um pieces that were right for those those viewers those visitors themselves as well and it's really really important to consider that you're going to see three case studies and you may well think well i'm not sure how that specific project could be applied to me but we're certainly going to be talking through not just the the end results but some of the decisions that led people there how these projects evolved how they were strategically put together and how they're intended strategically to continue on as well it's hugely hugely important to the space that the work that we support offers these insights offers these potential next steps for other organizations in addition to the organizations that we support directly as well and we really hope that these case studies will feel informative insightful and inspiring talk with you as well we are very very very aware that for a lot of organizations the past 18 months two years have been incredibly disruptive for many of us we have been looking at ways of maintaining visibility with our visitors maintaining relevance with our communities with those who were unable to come and see us and those who we were unable to interact with in person or in real life certainly where we were those were limited there is a sense that we're coming out of this time now but at the same time this isn't to say that we might see further disruption up ahead or at the same time that we may not have really really demonstrated to ourselves that there are huge swathes of audiences who for various access reasons are unable to interact with us in real life or have been unable to take part in our in person or more traditional offerings i know that all of us will be doing a great deal of work and have been doing a great deal of work far far far before govid in order to try and make our work as accessible as possible and again it's really really important to realize some of the shifts that have happened over the last 18 months in terms of our visitor engagement levels in terms of their appetite for digital tool in terms of the learning curve that they themselves have gone on around digital tools as well and the new spaces that these represent for us to move into to meet them there to communicate and engage with them in those places as well um so again as i say without further ado i'm gonna pass back to linda in order to introduce our speakers as i say i really hope that you'll get a lot out of them we'll have opportunities for questions and i'll be around throughout the day as well to join in um but yeah we really hope you get along at this huge thanks to all the speakers who have joined us today i'll pass back to linda now thank you thanks rob so as i said our first speaker today is louise stafford who's the director of learning at the national holocaust center and museum and louise are you there i am here yes thank you very much linda it's lovely to be with you uh this morning thank you so much for inviting me can you hear me okay yes we can yeah yeah yeah we just had today we were going to start really weren't we rather than talking about the pro the specific project the forever project that you're going to be sharing with us but you're going to give us a show round of the site and really bring it to life that way so do you want to just kick off louise yeah that's exactly right thank you very much so um i'm hoping that i'm managing to you can hide all of the things that might disrupt you uh being able to see this and um hopefully uh you can see on your screen linda if i just check that you can see it on yours yes a picture of steve mendelsohn i can i i'm joining you as part of the team at the national holocaust center and museum and hopefully i'll get a chance to tell you a little bit more about our organization in a second but by far the most privileged aspect of our work is being able to work with survivors of the holocaust and you can see on your screens in front of you steve mendelson who came to britain on the kindertransport to flee nazi persecution and steve was somebody who i knew really well who i worked with often um a really kind gentle uh man who was just absolutely fantastic uh working with primary age students as well as others um and incredibly uh mischievous and cheeky and very very funny and steve passed away around four years ago um but steve had already been filmed as part of our forever project and i'm just going to introduce steve's testimony to you hello there my name is steve mendelson and i was born in germany in a city called breslau in 1926. that city today is polish it's in poland and it's called roth's love so i'm going to share a little bit more with you about the different aspects of the forever project in a second but one of the really incredible aspects of this resource is the ability to ask the survivors questions um and to have those questions answered using the technology of the uh the database and steve obviously speaks about his experiences in germany as a child before leaving on the kindertransport i'm going to ask steve what was your experience of the night of broken glass we received my mother received the phone call early on the morning of the 9th of september 1938. don't send the children to school and she says who are you don't send the children to school who who is speaking please don't send the children to school and then put the phone down it was obviously a german person who was not prepared to give his or her name but just to warn my mother that things were happening out there and you mustn't send the kids to school and one of the things that i think is just really incredible um about that piece of testimony from steve there is the fact that for us when we heard steve um share his testimony at the center and particularly when he was speaking to young people that was one of the aspects of his testimony which he didn't share on a regular basis so the riots that steve is speaking about there the night of broken glass was a real turning point for jewish families in germany and other places and the point at which through state sanctioned violence they knew that life was changed irrevocably and it was the point at which there was a real desperation for families to become refugees and those children obviously which left on the kinder transport and that really a short exit of testimony there is so powerful in not only drawing out the severity of what was happening for steve as a as a child as a boy and for his parents but also in terms of um for us as an educational organization working with young people to draw out that element of choices and responsibility and the actions of those in the community that steve was part of so one of the things that we have found through the forever project and through filming the survivors who were involved not only in sharing their full testimony but also in sharing their responses to up to a thousand questions is that we have drawn out just really um specific and really important aspects of testimony that for us as educators at times we hadn't heard before so in terms of the um the site that we have been sharing with students over um about the last year one of the things that we have found really important is just the contextualization of the testimony so when students or the educators with students access the microsite then the first thing that they are able to do is share the full testimony of the survivor who they are whose testimony they are working with but we have also as an education team broken this down into key themes so that we're able to share shorter exits of testimony with the students and we're also just able to model examples of questions for them that give them a sense of the range of questions that are available to them hello there students my name is steve mendelsohn able to go into apologies steve and then able to go into the conversation section and to be able to have just a free flow conversation or modeled conversation in which they're able to access those different aspects of testimony [Music] louise are you going to show us anything else or do you want to come back in or not and thank you linda i was just uh checking there for my window would i be able to come back in please yeah of course thank you you've given us a really good sort of flavor of of of what what the forever project does and how it how it works um can you can you sort of you just explain to us a bit that you know that it you it's the aim of it the primary audience is um students young students um what kind of experience were you hoping to achieve for the students online yeah i think that's a really good question so um our starting point with the forever project was that daily you know before the pandemic we have been delivering two students um at our museum and sharing um the testimony of survivors in person with them so um i can kind of just show you an example here of martin stern one of our survivors um speaking in our um hall and this the starting point is the absolute richness of their testimony and the dialogue that occurs between the students and the survivor as they're able to ask their own questions and as we started to look at the future of holocaust education when we don't have survivors who are able to speak in the first person and to share that first-hand witness testimony then we were looking at how the richness of that dialogue was able to continue and as we started to film the survivors uh create that database create that really rich resource um we had already started to explore working with that online um but obviously hadn't really anticipated how much that would be accelerated through the pandemic and we found that we had to do so much learning in a short space of time because prior to that point the work with the forever project had still been in that hall it's still been in that museum setting so what we found with working with students online is that that sense of um almost reverence not reference but a really deep respect uh for the survivors and for the testimonies is still there as the students are working with those testimonies and i think that is partly because of that working contextualization and because it is mediated to an educator but what we have found is the students i think really appreciate having that more inquiry-based explorative approach to learning by being able to ask questions and follow up questions and being able to determine their own learning pathways to a certain extent and i think that they have really found that interesting and i think sometimes there's a sense that they feel more able to ask questions which they perhaps might feel a bit more nervous to ask in person and it takes away maybe that sense of nervousness uh to a certain extent in asking those questions isn't it interesting what you know you talk you you talk about how much you've learned from doing the project what has what if anything has surprised you really stuck out for you oh i'm thinking about this really specifically because of a conversation i've had with a survivor this week and um it's really difficult to second-guess ourselves because i mean we started this project uh maybe six seven years ago um and our relationship with the survivors is so close but i think it was actually really difficult for us to kind of look forward and and really um try to imagine these audiences who wouldn't work in first person with survivors so i think to a certain extent it's it's kind of looking back with a degree of hindsight um but i do think that what we started with was trying to replicate as far as we could that experience in the hall and what we absolutely underestimated was the kind of the richness of the archive that we were creating and what the potential of that was completely away from the museum setting and i think if we had looked forward a little bit more which i don't know if we'd actually been able to do or not but if we had i think that um we would have probably gone about the process slightly differently in the sense of um i'll give you an example so um there are questions that the students ask and they would ask follow-on questions now at the moment the way that the database works is that each question and answer is standalone so there isn't a kind of a predetermined path that takes you down into a kind of a deeper understanding of one theme or one particular aspect but actually as we look at the potential of filming other survivors i think that's something that we would look to because i think that's really beneficial for the students learning now that's something that would never happen with a survivor in person usually at the memorial hall because you want as many students as possible to be able to ask a question so there just isn't the space for that so so that just gives you an example really of what we're learning is we're in that online space yeah and you know you're sort of starting with what you already have your collection of people and you know the opportunity here and i suppose it echoes the idea that people were saying you know story first technology second but how did you on the sort of choice of technology and the approach you took what what sort of drove you how did you decide how you were going to do this yeah that's a really good question and again i think it was it was at a time when we were probably you know less well-versed in terms of digital uh options and ways of assisting our work so again i think this has been so iterative um but i think what was at the heart of it was that sense of dialogue and that q a experience because when we spoke to teachers and other audiences before the creation of the project that was the thing that they told us that they were most nervous about losing in a way there is so much filmed testimony that exists of survivors of the holocaust all of it is so important and all of it is so critical to preserve but i think what is so difficult to kind of hold on to is that ability for a 14 year old boy to listen to a survivor share their testimony and think that is the one bit that really kind of engages me i really want to know more about whether it's uh the faith of the survivor and how that was affected by their experiences or a sense of justice or what happened to one person within their family history and story um and it was to be able to preserve that okay i'm gonna ask the audience generally whether they've if anybody has any specific questions for louise at this point will you put put them into chat and then i'll ask them of her um so so can you the thing that struck me when we spoke before was that you said you know there's you ask a thousand questions and it's just i mean you know and it takes five days to record one person it's an incredible undertaking isn't it are you pleased with the outcomes you've got to so far yes absolutely and i think you know the the kind of the first privilege for us is working with the survivors and our survivor family the fact that they with us undertook this process i think is is absolutely incredible and i think that it was it's a a huge ask you know to to be part of this project and there are things that we are we're really aware of you know during filming and how to support survivors in that sense um but the feedback that we've had from teachers and from students so far that they're absolutely blown away by the resource you know that when they're using it they think that it's just incredible to be able to have this curated conversation um and just the the impact that it still has on students so yes absolutely can can you um can you say a bit more about the idea of a curated conversation and the role of um mediation in the experience yes so for us that's something that particularly because our focus obviously is on education that's something that for us is a really crucial aspect of this that in the way that the website is designed obviously the the open q a um is almost the the kind of the highlight you know the culmination of the experience but that will always be within a historical context partly for appropriateness and and having that understanding of the testimony but also and you saw that where there were the the kind of the model questions to to give the students a sense of the the questions that we have in the database because without that i think you don't have the opportunity for the students to really draw on the depth within the database so so the role of the educator is to first of all make sure that the students have that historical context also that they are able to really access the depth of the content within it and i think the last thing for us almost more is a kind of an ethical question uh that is really important at the moment the majority of educators that we have working with those testimonies know all of those survivors the ones who are um still with us the ones who have passed away in person and knew them well and there's almost an oral history that accompanies using the forever project you know i will talk to students about stephen you know he used to get at the end of his testimony and say right i'm going to go and take my medicine now and then you go outside and have a cigarette it's just like all those you know those little stories that come from knowing the person and over time you know as the team grows and changes over time kind of that aspect of the curated moderated experience and how we do that as well yeah okay thank you so we've had a couple of questions and um i'm just going to go into them when i'm saying would you be able to tell us a bit about what technology you used and was it sourced in-house or was it was it outsourced it was outsourced um and we got obviously support a lot of support externally in in the creation of this through the uh the technology um and the technology has has moved on from the first iteration that we had at the center so it uses nlp to to match the answer uh from the database um but the the version that we're using now the online version um is a kind of a progression from the first technology that we had and almost allows training so as the resource is used more often then the matching becomes more accurate um and that's something that we've found as we've used it so um so the the the company that hold this technology now forever holdings um is the the commercial aspect of the work that has been done in the company that's come from this but but that started from an external source and um paul who's going to be speaking later on and i think has a vested interest is asking whether you've ever considered an immersive vr experience using the archive yeah so that's a really good question we initially the first iteration that was at the museum uh is a 3d version um so in the first situation when students came into the hall they wore 3d glasses and there was a 3d version almost kind of sat on the stage you know virtually as the survivors would be um and then a top screen above that had a kind of a close-up of the survivor with their power point as size were being shared and what we found actually is that for a lot of the students the 3d element was less critical to them than the q a and we found that quite a lot of students were watching the top screen the 2d version rather than the 3d version um so we have had conversations uh you know only kind of very stamped ones in terms of other technologies available and um you know the kind of potential of vr etc but if i'm really honest i think what we're still learning about actually is just the pedagogy around working with this um resource as it is at the moment and it's a bit like you said linda it's kind of you work with the content first and the technology supports and i feel that we've particularly because of that online process are accelerating so much we're right in the throes of this learning process and i think we've got we want to kind of work on this first before then returning to it the tech question thank you very much so that that's the end of the time we've got just with you louise so just a couple of things to say thank you to you and also to say that there's a question that's in the chat from rosie morris you'll see it and i wonder if you wouldn't mind when because we're going to bring claire in our next speaker now if you wouldn't mind just writing a reply to that of course not thank you rosie and then and then what we'll do is at the end of the session you'll come back in and then we'll kind of cover off any other questions that have come to people in the meantime thank you thank you so much linda thank you thank you see you later okay um so our next speaker is um claire freeman is an audio consultant and claire's about to appear but i just need to flag with you all that um claire's had covid and paul claire is in recovery i think would be the best way to date so claire is going to be joined by rob lindsey who from the space who's also involved in this project and has a bit of knowledge about it so that if claire's voice gives up rob might just step in and help and answer the questions is that is that fair claire is that happening i think that's very very fair yeah all right so so we're gonna we're gonna see how you get on if you if it becomes too much just flag furiously and we'll we'll we'll flip quickly to rob but can you do a bit of setup and tell us about cornish tales the project that that you're about to give us a bit more information in just get some set up and then we'll play the audiogram yeah absolutely so um i imagine that in lots of museums in the back rooms you know the dusty archives that no one dares go down the doors and the shelves there are many cassette tapes and maybe even older types of tapes that children of today probably wouldn't have a clue what they are um and they're not used and that was the situation that the cornwall museum's partnership found themselves in and they said how can we kind of repurpose these and they have 200 museums under their wing but they picked out three and um three of the museums opened their doors they said here is a list of all the archive we have um go take it and in collaboration with a technology company hi nine um i kind of operated as a bit of a audio consultant a bit of a curator um we had a creative writer as part of hi-9 and a tech company which we repurposed these audio archives these cassette tapes untouched from 20 30 years ago sounds music stories all kinds of things we turned them into a series of clips which then were written into a story that worked out eventually to be an interactive choose your own adventure um alexa speaker kind of event um this is also a project where i'm really sorry if any of you have alexa in the background you may want to turn them off because it could do your heading if they go every two seconds um so the clip we've got to play now is just a little montage of one or two of those stories that we featured once we pulled out those clips okay lovely so can we have the clip please i remember coming down on an old steam train here was this hidden valley just a few miles from land's end and one thought you know well the actual first time i worked in the tunnel i do recollect it it was bitterly cold i don't think we even had doors on the tunnel at that time years ago the elite which flows beyond the brewery used the flood a lot of these cans got washed down to patrice road [Applause] now these ganders is a woolen garment that is meant for fishermen each locality the wives knitted their own particular patterns now these gounders because they had their unique patterns identified lots of men who were dreamt and washed up they knew where they come from by the pattern on the counter so that's a little taster of like a montage of some of the clips um that we did and i actually went through we had an extensive uh google docs spreadsheet which if any of you saw you'd think that we sneezed on a spreadsheet but we collected 29 hours of raw audio um i then listened through and themed them highlighted some of the interesting ones and made it into 180 audio clips which then a creative writer looked at making a story where people could choose where they wanted to go to next in the interactive story either by a theme a location you know do you want to go to the harbour do you want to go and hear more about the artists um and there were something like 800 plus permutations i think um so that was kind of at the heart of what it was but there was a lit something a little bit wider in terms of audience as well um as the original kind of scope of the project was to take the archives and and see whether we could use it as a research project to help people in care homes who had dementia so how could we take these sounds these places these stories to help offer them um some respite and for the carers in the care homes to kind of get these people involved in technology because we were aware when we first started the project um all of us together actually about some research that have been out there to show that smart speakers um are used by older audience not just a younger audience and not also just used as a functional aspect so not just as a timer to tell you that your cooking is ready now or a timer to tell you to take your tablets actually people wanted to use these things and it was also a really great way of tackling isolation loneliness um you know feeling like that people would build relationships with smart speakers almost as a friend so we wanted to provide something that could work um for that audience and see how did they engage with it um and a little bit like what louise was saying i suppose we we we wanted to kind of explore some of the themes about what kind of things were people asking were there kind of like trends in the roots that people wanted to take through the story you know do most people want to kind of hear the same music track again and again and again or did they want to hear something different um music was also something we featured um people could go into a pub and listen and choose which track they wanted to listen to not just the stories about people from the war um and i think like as someone who works um you know i come from more of a bbc background um more about the news but quite often when you work as a journalist you very rarely you have to kind of send lots of emails to get access to these kind of archives you know you have to be banging the door down begging maybe paying a lot of money to get access to these but it was great to kind of get access to to hear and see this and i felt as most of the project was done during lockdown many of us never ever met each other still haven't we kind of formed a connection over zoom um but it was great to kind of be sat there listening to you know a man talking about his time during the war when he worked in the solomon islands and the island run out of toilet paper you know such a random thing that yes it might not necessarily have a place inside the museum but it did in the context of this story it was a nice kind of little bit of color amongst lots of different things so i don't know if that kind of just gives a bit of a flavor of what it is we're doing it does and i'm i'm hearing a bit of a croak in your throat i'm wondering if you can carry on talking whether i should go to rob for a minute i'm gonna have a little little drink of my uh non-branded um fizzy drink but yeah i'm just gonna ask what then from hearing uh what claire said so far what you know what what do you think about the learnings that come out essentially this is an r d project how could we use the archive what what would you say about the learnings that have come from the project yeah absolutely well i i think one thing that i i do want to touch upon as well because this this um in addition to what was achieved within this project in terms of the technical accomplishments as well i just want to pick up and expand upon what claire's just said there about the fact that everyone was collaborating on this remotely you know there are there are partners on this project who have still never met one another you know the entire thing from inception through to delivery has happened entirely remotely and i think it is i just want to recognize claire's role on this project in terms of little things like bridging the language between technology and the art sector as well i think that was a huge element that had to be addressed you know a number of times in order to make sure that the museum staff were clear on what was being used why things were being used um and yeah at the same time that the questions and the asks from the tech partner were being translated and they were getting what they needed as well um in addition to that i just want to flag as well because i know claire you did some additional work with the um with the the staff at the museums as well because while they had protocols in place for recording documenting capturing authenticating all of this audio materials citing their sources obviously times dates and all that sort of stuff so that they knew that things were um were you know reliable as sources um at the same time there wasn't necessarily protocols in place with regard to what these things would ultimately be used for you know there was an element of these things maybe being recorded the idea being that they might one day be used in a documentary or they might be transcribed nothing really beyond that you know you talked there about there being dusty shelves of of tape formats that a lot of us might not even recognize anymore you know and i just think it's really really important to recognize that because i know you did end up doing quite a lot of work with the people from the museums in order to say okay let's build upon these protocols you've got now that we're starting to understand the digital opportunities that are afforded to us and the sort of things you might need within these audio recordings in order to make them browseable and accessible i mean you mentioned 29 hours of recordings and you know i'm sure there were hundreds if not thousands more as well you know it's a lot of things to go through so yeah i just wanted to flag that aspect of the project as well that ended up going alongside the output you know making sure that people had that that level of understanding in order to make future work um more approachable really yeah yeah it's more of an observation and an extra detail rather than a question brings us on to uh you know really thinking about claire's particular role in this as an audio consultant and what she's learned from it and what she might say to any other arts organization or collection thinking about doing something similar yeah i mean it is actually girl suppose i don't work for cornwall museums partnership this is their project you know i came in as an outsider and whilst we had the initial idea to kind of convert all these tapes and make this thing there was a lot more to it i think so you know from my point of view when we actually dug out these files although some of them were digitized some of them you know were 5.1 surround sound hd films that were getting sent to me from cornwall and no disservice to cornwall but the wi-fi was very slow so it would take days sometime to send like an hour file to me um and you know just the quality of some so when we thought uh for this kind of situation what i needed was clean conversation where i could lift out clips so ideally i didn't need an interviewer talking over somebody i didn't need the kind of the typical things that we do when we're in person with each other where we go all right oh yeah needed none of that so if you are capturing audio um even just for archiving purpose it's definitely worth bearing in mind please make sure that you don't interrupt just give it clean um because some of it we just couldn't use it needed to be kind of solo rather than two people being interviewed at the same time um and the quality you know there was stuff that was on cassette tape which when we converted it was really hissy i can't really put that on something you know next to another quality so it's there are things there are kind of standards that we had to adhere to to make it work because ultimately when we put the audio clips onto the google assist or alexa smart speaker um platforms they needed to adhere to a certain level of quality and levels wise they need to be the same you don't want one clip that's blaring at you and another clip that's really quiet so it took us a little while and there were things that we had to put aside and say we can't use that as beautiful as it is in reality and i think also this idea um linda that you were talking about um story first tech second it was something that we wrestled with a lot actually um because we were writing a script around the audio clips and at first we were like do we write the script and then we put the clips in where we think but in the end we had to completely flip upside down get the clips that we wanted and write the script to work around the clips um and it was just quite a long process even the testing you know i've never worked with a tech company before in how you make one of these interactive stories on alexa and google the testing they had to do the different stages the permutation checks they have to do but then also access to well which is where right now really in terms of seeing the analytics and perhaps the usage we're not quite there in kind of finishing the report yet that's still to come um but i i you know there was a lot more to it than let's just get some stories and make a pretty thing it's probably at least six months okay thank you i'm just we've just got a minute or so if anybody has any particular questions declared you want to put them into chat now and we'll quickly either answer them or if we run out of time i'll ask claire to do it in a written form but just um can anybody who has an alexa or smart speaker access the content is there is there a link we should be putting into chat for anybody who wants to have a go at this is it uh that is that's rob got it yeah i know i haven't i was gonna ask a question though okay oh you're so polite putting your hand up as a panelist you could just interrupt you're like the boss or something aren't you we've just got a minute so quick question quick answer yeah it was just a very very quick question i had which was um oh well in fact i can come back to this because i've seen it possibly a quicker question that just appeared in the chat and i don't want to deny someone else's channel yeah no go for that one first and then we'll yeah so uh suzy says in the chat did you find any workarounds for using lower quality sounds or did you have to just put things aside for for the sake of this project uh yeah sometimes what i would do is i would use free sound effects and i would do shorter clips for those if we really really really wanted something there are things i could do in terms of noise reduction and normalizing and things like that um but yeah sound effects got us out of a lot of holes sounds of waves they cover everything don't they cornwall not so useful if you're in cambridgeshire where i live obviously yeah okay really quick yes i think i just want to stress because um there was a level of onboarding on this so obviously when people first take part in the projects there's a few things to kind of guide them in i know that for example um louise talking about the project that they've done earlier on there is a page that has almost demonstration questions things to try out and i know that there was a sort of there was an audio version of this on of that on this project as well where people were given a couple of very easy to answer questions am i i'm right in saying that there was a little bit at the beginning inviting people to give their name and to kind of introduce themselves to the to the experience given some some initial questions it's just some of those discussions around that element of how the user is guided into the process at the beginning yeah it's not really my bag to kind of answer that small like high nine that's more like the tech company and i think that's why if you are looking at going down this route you really need to work with look for a tech company who really understand the arts and culture world because actually the tech world and the arts world together are very two different slow-moving beasts fast-moving beasts so it's about finding the right partner that would be one that they would explain far better than i could okay fantastic lovely i'm uh thank you thank you to claire and for rob for stepping in as well at moments there um we're going to have a five-minute break and then claire if you wouldn't mind just being around on chat if people have got questions to ask you separately so we'll come back at um literally five minutes it'll be two minutes past 12 to and we'll hear from paul long at that point so nothing you won't hear anything until then thanks okay so um we're we're back with our third case study so this time you'll hear from paul long who is the director of metro boolo dodu mbd i'll say it that way um who are an immersive storytelling organization and he'll tell you a little bit more about them and paul are you around i'm right here yes hello hello so i'm very sorry for that model um but you're gonna we all really need to talk about heritage stories and it's different from the other case studies and that it didn't it all that was a collaboration with the herbert it really starts with you doesn't it in your company so i wonder if you would um tell us a little bit about how you conceive of the idea of heritage stories and then you're going to show us a trailer and which will give us a flavor of how it works and what it offers yeah i mean i i guess it's important to kind of give a bit of context i think to us as a company because as you say now we call ourselves an immersive storytelling company i guess we have been that for a long time but um not immersive technology in the way that we think of it now i think it's the the main thing we're a we're an arts company rather than specifically a kind of museum or historical company and we actually started in 1997 so 24 years ago as a theater company that was what we that's what i trained in that's what we started out doing um and we spent some years kind of touring theater and then we branched out into um other kind of immersive experiences so tours and things like that so we did at that point this around 2000 so 20 years ago we started working in museums but things like the basements of museums and we would work with historic houses and kind of heritage sites and this kind of thing um doing different pieces of work so our links with heritage go back a long way um and throughout all of that we always work with technology so we always did a lot of work in terms of automation how we would set up the lighting systems and the video that was included with the tours how we recorded the sound etc um all through those years we kind of crafted this this way of working that brought people into spaces um physical spaces and at the same time we were still touring sometimes to theaters but also to street arts festivals nationally internationally as well um so our background is very much as an arts company and i think that's kind of important to how we came into this this project um the real kind of driving force point was was two things first of all we started working with virtual reality um about five or six years ago um and we began making more linear kind of projects but built within a games engine so the same kind of software that you would use to make into a playstation and all of that um all of those kind of console type um games or pc type games um and we realized that this was a a great immersive space but b it meant we didn't have to tour lots of stuff everywhere anymore and lift things in and out of trucks all the time and which frankly i think i was getting a bit too old for and the shine began to wear off um so there was this kind of realization that we could build big immersive spectacular spaces um with the immersive technology um and there's one project in particular that we went back to from 2004 which was called fib where we made an installation based around 14 boxes and all of those boxes it contained small three-minute individual experiences and when we started looking at vr we translated this into the idea of a lift and we said well just imagine if we don't have to tour all the 14 boxes actually but we can just create these miniature experiences and then put them together in a a multi-storey and i say that it's upon um s-t-o-r-e-y obviously because of the lift a multi-storey experience which we can kind of join collections of things together whether that's around a theme or or in this case museum collections obviously um that people could actually just get in the lift push a button choose a story get out and then you know experience a three to five minute piece and then just go back in the lift and choose another one and for us it was a beautiful kind of scalable way of making an immersive experience um and we'll come back to the kind of practical things behind that i think a little bit later about how that reuses floor space etc but i think the the primary thing now is i'll just share that introduction video as you said linda and then we can have a chat about it hopefully it'll make more sense after this so just give me a moment to share my screen okay and i said that if you've got questions for paul anything that's coming into your mind please put them into chat as we're going along so you should be able to see and hear this for who yeah [Music] [Music] great thank you thanks paul so so this is an an installation that went into the herbert and then presumably the people the public could just come in and go into the lift and the way they went exactly that yeah so i mean basically we were working through different versions of virtual reality so we'd made kind of more as i said seated linear storytelling kind of video versions and this was us trying out um i mean what we call six degrees of freedom but basically it means you can walk around in virtual reality as well so this had a four meter by three meter footprint um which was effectively a big rubber mat um everything else was virtual but you could walk around freely it on that map and explore the space with a backpack pc and a vr headset um and actually just be able to kind of reach out and interact with those worlds and then and then the lift was there as it says as a kind of a metaphor if you like but really as a as a transport mechanism to get between the different flaws so um one of the the first piece that we built primarily you know specifically for the project was the one that you see mostly in the the video that i shared which was about an xtheus ichthyosaur skull which was part of the herbert gallery's collection and so we found out the story behind the skull and then recreated parts of that effectively the the skull was discovered somebody was charged with cycling back to warwickshire with this skull but decided it was too heavy and threw it in a ditch halfway um and then was sent back to kind of retrieve it so there's these whole i think the point is there's these whole stories that happen around collection items which you don't get from just seeing the item and for me the the potential of the immersive tech was to be able to um you know tell tell the background tell and see the background the context the story um that goes that goes with those collection items yeah and what what was the you said that quite a lot of it was about the the evaluation and understanding the audience experience what what did you learn from the audiences who took part and how they felt about it yeah i mean i think again all of this comes in the context of having done other things as well in virtual reality so it all feeds into the same thing but i think a lot of the time there is an assumption that you know you go into projects like this and say oh we're using technology therefore it's for young people you know and that was one of the first things that the herbert kind of said and we and we tried to say well you know if it's about young people then take the work to where the young people are we can put virtual reality on to the stores where the headset owners are etc but if it's actually about the museum then also you know that there may be some new young people coming but your existing audiences are still going to come in um and they may not you know predominantly they were slightly older which is why they wanted to target younger people and we said it still needs to be right for those people coming in and i think the fascinating thing was that um it did exactly that i mean i think the expectation that herbert was maybe that the older audiences wouldn't want to engage and actually i think they were the drivers they were the ones who were coming in one day and then coming back the next day with their friends and the next day with more friends and that kind of um that the museum existing audience was expanding with that um whereas for us as i say not so much with this project but with other projects if you can also take your collection items and put them online that's a completely new audience you know for us during the pandemic year we had 130 000 views on our different virtual reality projects they're people we couldn't have possibly got to physically even if there wasn't a pandemic you know that's that's more people than we could physically reach with the format that we've got so i think those things it's really important that you look at them in tandem and that you say you know the work that we're doing now it doesn't have to live in one place and for me that is the beauty of the technology um the technology opens it up opens it up to a whole new world of of people yeah exactly i mean i think one of the things that you said which i'm going to ask everybody else about later as well because it's really interesting you said to me that um you thought that museums were the best available technology at the time when they were built to present a collection and this you know and if you were doing it today you might start in a different way round and i guess that that's almost what you've done isn't it yeah i guess so i think i think the the point i tried to make with that is you know i have the same conversation around theaters people say oh vr it's not like live theater because live theater is live and i would say if you go to a theater show when you actually go into the auditorium they turn all the lights off and make you all look in one direction and kind of people don't talk with each other the the conversation is everything that happens around it and i think it's the same for museums you know like um the the collection items themselves for me are the most important thing and the story that surrounds them and a lot of museums would have started with somebody having a collection or a group of people having a collection then going how do we share it and i think at the time the answer how do we share it is if we have a building big enough to house our collection then we can invite people to come and see it um and you know that still stands today that's still an amazing way to share collection items but i think i think my point is now there are other alternatives as well if we have a collection item like that ichthyosaur school how do we share it and also who do we share it with becomes a very different question because we can reach more people than we than you know geographically a building might do um but also you know we can tell more of the story behind it than the item itself maybe does um and then kind of off the back of that i guess it comes with all the same questions as opening a building doesn't it's like how do you pay for it how do you get people to engage et cetera et cetera but actually the creative heart of it is is wanting the same thing it's going these collections are beautiful these collections are important these items need to have their stories told and that's what we want to do thank you just again if anybody has any particular questions for paul put them into chat in the meantime i'm going to ask rob whether there's anything particular that you'd like to add or ask of paul yeah so i suppose it's similar to the the question that's clear as well about i'm i'm aware and i'm sure all of us are aware that um there is a kind of human element to all of that which is our users our audiences our visitors and equally um there are projects like um like heritage stories that does require a level of kind of onboarding you know there is still a human element needed a level of staffing really um i just wondered if i could ask you a little bit about that i'm aware in particular that you went to great lengths to make sure that the experience was as simple and straightforward as possible for museum staff or volunteers to turn it on to get it working in the morning again i know that you're aware that projects like this of any kind like this people the public almost need to be given permission to pick things up and put things on and try things out i just wonder if i can ask you a little bit about that really yeah and i think understandably you know that people can can be nervous of technology you know um especially the volunteers and the people running it as well as as you say the public as well um i mean i think for us a lot of it was was a natural progression from what i said before from our touring days so when we used to tour with shows or even if we used to do gallery installations you know gallery stations could be in six eight weeks um and they were very technology led but essentially we knew that the people in the morning had to press one button to turn it on and everything else needed to work and so that's what we did with with this project it was effectively we we just made sure that in terms of the actual equipment once you switched um the computer on it booted itself into the project that it needed it made sure it kind of looked for the headset it set up the kind of perimeter zone and all of that completely automatically so the onboarding bit that we spent a long time with the volunteers was just making sure they were comfortable with how people can put the headset on um and and kind of explaining what the experience was going to be because i think part of the nervousness nervousness with vr in particular is you can't see what you're going to do before you do it so it's really important to kind of put people at ease um and make sure that they understand what is going to happen to them so that they are comfortable at the point they go in but that's not really a technology question you know once the if we make the technology job easy for the volunteers then explaining what things are is what they do on a daily basis so you know that i think that that worked really well it's just making sure that we you know don't set them up for a fall in terms of making something so complicated they can't use it but but that you know that that's beneficial for us and then because also we don't want to be called on a daily basis to ask how to switch something back on because it's broken you know yeah um thank you can i um can i ask a question thinking about audiences making things easy and i'm going to bring the others in back in on this as well but i wondered about how big a part what considerations you go to accessibility in terms of all audiences being able to access the vr and i know with vr there's probably quite specific issues but did did did you give that much consideration how do we make this as as accessible as possible and i will ask the other two the same question we did but also as i said it's kind of an iterative thing with all the projects at the moment so now we're working with leicester university and with a phd student doing much more research into accessibility in vr um and things that we can do to help so it's because because we're working in the 3d space things like you know subtitles don't work in quite the same way as they would normally because you've got multiple characters in multiple spaces so we can start attaching subtitles to people and things like that it becomes um a lot easier but i mean all of our projects now that are online all the video based ones we've subtitled all of those um but yeah i mean there are there are issues with vr and some of them are some of them are really difficult to overcome because they're hardware based you know like we made a project empire soldiers a south asian story which was about south asian troops contribution to world war one um obviously a large number of people who were interested in watching that and came along to it also they wore turbans and vr headsets and turbans are not a great mix so you've got all of those kind of access questions as well about physically how easy is it to get into into vr um so there's a lot of things i mean we're i think at the moment we're mostly focused on the audio side of it because that is something that a we have a specialist on our board who deals with that um who also works for the university so it gives us a really clear direction of travel to actually start solving those problems first rather than doing everything at once of course thank you and um claire oh louise do you have any um anything you could add really in terms of thinking about accessibility louise yeah yeah i get i completely agree with paul i think it's something that again has been kind of a really iterative process for us so i think part of it came from working with the schools um and that sense of always working with quite a diverse audience at the center in terms of the student groups but then also thinking about members of the public and older members of the public and actually in terms of the way that they wanted to access and work with forever we found it was quite different so some of the things that i was talking about in terms of contextualization whereas for students we're looking at creating you know kind of shorter versions of the testimony working with excerpts actually for some of our um older audiences they wanted to sit and watch the testimony in full um and then ask questions at the end so just the way that they wanted to to kind of work with or engage with the results was different um but in terms of some of those other questions that access questions like subtitling uh similarly you know kind of iterative for us and there are things that in the future that we would want to do um in terms of that um the second thing i just to if you didn't mind me chipping in with what paul was saying about the kind of the role of volunteers and you know people who are actually working with the technology and that has been a huge learning process for us um in terms of the forever project and we've got quite a big team of educators uh who work with the um forever project and we we had particularly kind of in the first situations when it was on site people were understandably really nervous about working with um new tech and um i i'm gonna talk for myself because it's easier but that kind of sense of you know the kind of the if something doesn't work kind of immediately in the way you expect it to you're almost afraid to touch it again in case you break it it's just kind of like how you get over uh kind of that sense and we went back to the company that we'd worked with uh and i always remember uh christie which was saying to me you know just because you go and sit in a car it doesn't mean you can drive you have to learn how to drive you have to learn how to use the technology and we actually appointed two educators who were our drivers so they they got absolutely immersed in using forever they worked really closely with chris kind of on the tech side who explained okay well when you do this with the microphone that's why it does that so they kind of got all of that insider information and then they taught us to be drivers too um and i think kind of having people in the team who take on you know that uh kind of developing confidence by not being afraid to ask what you perceive as daft questions i think is a really important part of it yeah lovely thank you very much thank you claire did you have anything to add either on specifically about accessibility or anything that sparked by what louise has just said no i mean i think um similar to what louise had said you know we actually um partnered with um a firm which went and you know worked with care homes to collaborate with the carers you know so that they could take this product and and work with them so that you know the the people who we wanted to reach were able to and if there were sticking points you know if there were bugs or it crashed or something rather than what louise has said oh forget it can't be bothered actually you could go back and figure out what happened um i think that was really important and i suppose from an audio point of view um i know i'm biased but sometimes i do worry that people focus a lot about what things look like but for a true immersive experience when you're wearing headphones don't discount that the audio experience is actually just as important if not sometimes more important and when you think about the layering of like sound effects and speech make sure you get that kind of quite right because with certain audiences particularly an older audience if you've got too much sound effects and they can't hear what they're saying it is the number one complaint of uh bbc tv audiences is that the music was too loud thank you um paul's going to say something and i just want to point you to um we've had a comment a question in chat really which you might want to come back to which is saying have you looked at volunteers from diverse backgrounds and thinking about how they might um adults with additional needs who could take part in thinking about accessibility and be part of that um paul to over to you what were you going to say yeah i mean i was just going to you know what's been said all around i think the key thing with all of the working with t

2021-10-29 21:53

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