Covid and museums: how to stay open even if your museum is closed
Covid emergency is not over. So is the alternation of local restrictions making museums’ lives a roller coaster swinging between closures and openings aimed at controlling the epidemic curve.
If the majority of insights related to the impact of covid on museums show discouraging data (NEMO, for example, estimated the weekly loss of income for museums located in the most touristic places among 70-80%), specific and positive cases in which the use of digital tools helped museums retain their visitor rate and increase their income are rapidly growing.
But which digital tools for museums among the ones offered by IT companies were revealed to be the best allies for the survival of culture during this critical historical moment? Let’s find out the top three of the list.
1. Virtual tours
They are surely the tools that have been mostly used by museums during their forced closures because they offer the chance to explore the museum and its collections from anywhere and with any device.
Tours can consist of a navigable, 3D reconstruction of the venues, or in a 360° photographic reconstruction showing the real indoor spaces of the museum.
If before covid took over many museums were worried about virtual tours being perceived as a substitute for the physical visit, the incredible number of visitors returning to museums once they opened again demonstrated that this kind of tool is rather considered as an “enhanced trailer” of the exhibitions on display and that everyone was just more enthralled of going to the museum after they took the virtual tour.
Museum Virtual Tour by Hidonix
2. Augmented Reality
If the visitor will not go to the exhibition, the exhibition will go to the visitor.
For all those museums wishing to exhibit all their artworks and repertories – even the ones kept inside their storages – augmented reality is for sure one of the most engaging and money-saving solutions to attract their audiences when they can’t move from home. To apply this technology to this context, all museums need is a 3D version of the artworks and software able to recognize surfaces and walls.
Et voilà, the exhibition is served at home.
Art at home by Hidonix
3. On demand performances and content
A performance can take place inside a delimited space while being broadcasted in more than one place in the world: why not use the potential of streaming to create art which is available on-demand?
Through some mobile apps, museums can create a calendar of events, sell online accesses and create virtual environments where visitors can interact with the performance and with other visitors, creating a form of interchange which is hardly replicable in presence.
Will these technologies be useful also when the pandemic ends?
But what will happen when the pandemic is over? Will investments be absorbed and returned in a period that is (hopefully) this short?
The answer is positive. If before covid spread, these technologies had some difficulties in taking over the market, now that all of us are being forced to learn how to cope with smart working and learning, we all have much more confidence with using media to discover the world that surrounds us.
Therefore, museums that will adopt the mentioned technologies will have the chance to satisfy the requests coming from different targets, like, for example, people who can’t travel or who can’t afford a trip to their location.
All that’s left is therefore to be ready for change: covid has surely brought crisis and pain, but it is also already a driving force for new possibilities.