I was watching the Business News Network (Showcase "Disruptors") the other day where they were doing a piece on VR (virtual reality) technology within different mediums of media. They had the company SimWave showcased and their "Vimy Ridge VR" experience. The thing that caught me however was their comment on the Museum experience, and how they expressed that Museums are often non profitable and fail to pull in new crowds.
Relevant were these two following tid bits, the article I came across while creating this question and topic was "Soldier Stories" Through of collaboration google's cardboard VR there was this movie created using stereoscopic images and narration to show soldiers lives in WWI; and lastly a couple years ago my local War Museum "The Military Museums" of Calgary did an interactive and digital display for WWI consisting of flight sims, and "Valiant Hearts: The Great War" by Ubisoft Montpellier, to pull in a younger audience "story can be found here"
The question is, are Museums doing enough to make History relevant to a faster paced world, are the glass cases of relics and artifacts still enough to keep history exciting to the public?
I did my MA thesis on this topic, all the way back in 2010. In short, no, glass cases are not going to cut it anymore. I can't find a copy of the paper right now (which is distressing), but a word that came up a lot to describe visitors was "post-tourist." The rising generations have been raised on interactive entertainment, and will expect some degree of that from edu-tainment like museums, as well. That VR exhibit sounds like a powerful way to use new technologies.
This is a very complicated topic and there are numerous articles and books written on the subject in the museum sector. Essentially it boils down to a few different aspects: authenticity, money, availability, uncertainty and age (one could probably list more).
A big part of our ALM (Archive, Library and Museum) collections is that they are authentic, they are real. The discussions about this issue are rather compelling on both sides and include arguments such as follows.
For: Even a digital world provides the public - and a much wider such - with access to authentic objects. A digital world also largely removes the monetary issues that might be involved in a decision of whether or not to visit a museum (admission, travel time). Digitalization allows for a larger percentage of the collections to be available to the public. Sure, this is already being done through open databases, but it's a whole other thing to be able to see the things through a medium like VR.
Against: Despite VR providing a near-real experience, it still doesn't achieve what the complete physical experience does. That is not to say that VR is something to be cast aside, but rather that it isn't the wonderful replacement for the museum visit that it's made out to be. It's also costly, and putting resources into developing a VR environment might rather be put elsewhere.
As with most things, these progressions cost money. You need servers, competent personell, development time, and so on. Many museums are strained for resources as it is, with declining visitor numbers (due to an aging/dying visitor base) and changing politics. It's an evil circle that has to be solved, because while the older generation might in large extent visit museums, the younger generation(-s) aren't as eager to pay us visits.
A comment on:
and how they expressed that Museums are often non profitable and fail to pull in new crowds.
Museums are supposed to be non-profitable, the goal is to go +/-0, but the failure to pull in new crowds obviously make that more difficult.
This section mostly concerns the younger audience, because access to museums grow the better access to money you have, with admissions and travel taking their fair share. But there is also another reason. Youths today are used to on-demand activities, which give instant gratifications. A standard museum visit generally involves consideration as the visitor moves through the museum, but the younger generation prefers to avoid that self-thought and be served a number of pieces that they might consider, before moving on.
A big part of the younger generations' world today is checking something out before they try it. I.e., people talk about everything online, you don't have to go out and see if something is good by yourself, because someone else has already done so for you. Therefore it is essential for museums to have digital mediums of different kinds, from VR to social media.
There seem to be a great uncertainty in the field of what you can do with it. This is where transdisciplinary studies and workshops come in. The museum personell are great at knowing what their collections tell us and what we want/should teach the public about. However, many museum professionals are highly incompetent (not using that as an insult, but as a statement) when it comes to digital technology. For instance, many may have heard of VR, but not all them know what that is, and can they make an easy connection between VR and a thing like Second Life? That is where we need to get to. Second Life is quite old by now, but the idea is close to what we should work towards - the ability to visiting museums in a virtual world at any time of the day.
This is not referring to the age of museums or their collections, but to the people working in them. The museum world has a very high average-age and this is in my opinion something that really hurts them. Sure, if you enter a museum anywhere in the world today, you're likely to meet a lot of young people, but those are also entry-level (or similar) and have no saying in these things.
The age is an issue because the generation now running the museums are often not familiar with how technology is used to the extremes today. In my own experience, they aren't even decently familiar with how basic social media can be capitalized upon to reach out to new visitors. In that regard, we're a long way from taking the step from a purely physical museum world to a mixed digital-physical.
Europeana is a great initiative towards a digital museum world - and there are other examples - but even that is not at the level of interaction of the examples you're putting forward. We're simply not there yet.
** TL;DR **
No, in all honesty most museums aren't doing enough, even with the available resources, but they are progressing towards a digital world.
Further reading:
Black, G. (2012), Transforming Museums in the Twenty-first Century.
Keene, S. (2010, Fragments of the World: Uses of Museum Collections.