如今的博物馆可以展现3D视觉效果，营造出全沉浸式虚拟现实，利用这些新技术为观众带来全新的体验。不过，并非所有的博物馆都花得起这笔钱。博物馆像是一台时光机，观众可以走进来，近距离观赏那些随时间沉淀下来的宝藏。假如博物馆允许观众走进馆内的储藏室去翻翻捡捡，亲手把玩早已不复存在的文物，或是前往发现这些文物的原址去一探究竟，那会是怎样的一番情景呢？如今，世界各地的博物馆正在线上和线下积极利用沉浸式数字技术，让这些体验日渐成真。克里斯·迈克尔斯（Chris Michaels）是在伦敦工作的一位艺术和技术顾问兼研究员，他告诉我们，在两百年来的博物馆发展史上，可以帮助观众了解展品的“唯一可用技术”是由馆长编写的展品标签，但过去二十年来“呈现出爆发式发展，将观众与展品联系起来的不再只有简单的说明文字，更有多种多样的技术”。“在博物馆两百年来的发展史上，可以帮助观众了解展品的‘唯一可用技术’是由馆长编写的展品标签”
2023年9月，《关于劫掠的十段往事》（Loot: 10 Stories）在海牙莫瑞泰斯皇家美术馆举办了首展，随后又在柏林的洪堡论坛博物馆展出。这项展览借助虚拟现实（VR）技术，深入探讨了由馆藏文物中那些切掠而来的藏品引发的各种争论。观众佩戴虚拟现实头戴设备，穿越来到奥地利的一处盐矿，纳粹分子从犹太人家里抢走的一幅伦勃朗自画像，就曾藏匿于此；观众还可以穿越到巴厘岛上的一座寺庙，一名身佩传统巴厘岛克力士短剑的士兵曾在这里惨遭荷兰殖民者军队杀害。展厅里陈列着这些文物，同时还放映着一部电影短片，向参观者讲解摄影测量法——这种技术可以将物品的360度全方位图像转化为纤毫毕现的3D数字孪生。在客座策展人兼电影制作人艾琳·琼斯玛（Eline Jongsma）和凯尔·奥尼尔（Kel O’Neill）看来，虚拟现实技术提供了强大的叙事工具，可以展现出“这些物品曾有过一段经历，它们对某人来说是有意义的”。琼斯玛说：“鉴于昔日那段极不平等的关系和悲伤的往事，我们有必要带领观众走出典型的博物馆场景。”“虚拟现实技术提供了强大的叙事工具，可以展现出‘些物品曾有过一段经历’”奥尼尔认为，柏林的观众通过虚拟现实技术可以“亲眼目睹”拿破仑率军攻入柏林，将勃兰登堡门上的《胜利女神四马战车》青铜雕像作为战利品拆下带走，当他们再次看到勃兰登堡门时，会真切地感受到历史和现实在此融合交汇，“人们可以同时体验过去和现在”。
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© 装置视图，澳大利亚新南威尔士州美术馆。照片：© 莎拉·肯德丁（ Sarah Kenderdine）莎拉·肯德丁（Sarah Kenderdine）、邵志飞（Jeffrey Shaw）和利思·陈（Leith Chan）在澳大利亚新南威尔士艺术博物馆展出的《净土》（Pure Land）增强现实装置。参观者通过 iPad 屏幕探索中国莫高窟内的壁画。
改变未来
澳大利亚国家荧幕文化博物馆（ACMI）馆长兼首席执行官塞博·詹（Seb Chan）认为，开办博物馆的宗旨就是鉴往知来，意在“改变我们心目中的未来”。这家博物馆的藏品包含电影、电视、电子游戏、数字艺术等诸多门类。“在我看来，这意味着必须熟稔当代文化，而当代文化如今又与数字媒体、网络媒体和相关技术密不可分。”荧幕文化博物馆正在积极行动，展出、收集和保存虚拟现实等原生数字格式资料，以留存后世。荧幕文化博物馆给自己的定位是“多平台博物馆”，致力于为墨尔本地区的观众提供线上和线下服务。实现这种综合体验的介质，是名为“Lens”的内置微芯片圆形纸板，观众在参观博物馆时，只需用Lens轻轻点击自己喜爱的展品，就可以把相关数字资料带回家，以便日后欣赏。詹告诉我们：“Lens既是纪念品，也有实用价值，可以用来继续参观我们的博物馆。”自从2021年启用这项设备以来，参观者已将超过1500万件展品纳入了自己的私人虚拟收藏。
位于苏格兰的格拉斯哥大学启动了一项耗资560万英镑的研究项目，目的是进一步拓展“民间策展人”理念。在英国政府的资助下，“元宇宙博物馆”项目正在开发原型数字平台，该平台将存储数百个通过扫描苏格兰博物馆藏品生成的3D文物模型。助理研究员弗格斯·布鲁斯（Fergus Bruce）表示，博物馆通常只能向公众展出10%的藏品，而“虚拟现实技术让展览摆脱了空间限制”。布鲁斯介绍说，他们的目标是提供一种博物馆网站上的线上访客体验不到的沉浸式虚拟现实。用户能够自主选择虚拟环境，并且能够在其中“操控、处理和展示”参与项目的博物馆的馆藏文物。未来将建成“双向”平台，用户可以创建和分享新的虚拟现实内容，也可以使用这些内容。公开版本预计将于2025年春季推出。只有一点不足——价格。许多机构承担不起昂贵的虚拟现实头戴设备及其维护和管理费用。萨诺斯·科基尼奥蒂斯（Thanos Kokkiniotis）身为屡获殊荣的文化旅行应用程序Smartify的首席执行官，他指出，移动增强现实（AR）技术在手机屏幕上就可以实现现实世界与3D数字视觉效果的叠加，相比之下“好处多多”，而且“增强现实技术就本质而言更加亲民，也更适合多人一起使用”。Smartify可以提供基于网络的增强现实，用户扫描二维码就可以通过浏览器直接访问，无需下载应用程序。科基尼奥蒂斯说：“你可以和朋友共用一台设备，共同获得愉快的体验。”他还介绍了公司近日与史密森尼美国艺术博物馆开展的一项增强现实技术合作。有了这项技术加持，许多参观者带上家人，在偌大的博物馆里玩起了古董寻宝游戏。瑞士洛桑联邦理工学院（EPFL）实验博物馆学实验室负责人莎拉·肯德丁（Sarah Kenderdine）教授指出，这种合作有助于博物馆尝试使用最新技术，但博物馆也需要警惕“说得天花乱坠的科技市场”。这家实验室专门从事文化遗产实物和数据的大规模数字可视化转换工作，为世界各地的展览制作3D模型和全景装置。曾经有一个项目是以探索佛教在亚洲的传播为主题的“互动时空旅行”，工作人员在五年实地研究的基础上绘制了数百处遗址。目前正在对路易斯·布劳恩（Louis Braun）的全景画《穆尔滕战役》（Battle of Murten）进行数字化处理，生成数字孪生。这幅画是瑞士国宝之一，原作高十米、长百米。肯德丁告诉我们，实验室的所有工作均指向同一个目标，为文化领域“公众参与新模式”赋能，“这就需要破除专业知识的制约”。肯德丁断言，博物馆拥有丰富的文物和文献资料，具备深厚的知识储备，“由于自身独特的社会属性，有能力推动特定技术的发展。在这个高度商业化的世界里，博物馆是不可多得的存在——它们坚定有力的价值观能够带动新的思想”。
联合国教科文组织关于博物馆的建议书
《关于保护和加强博物馆与收藏及其多样性和社会作用的建议书》于2015年通过。该建议书的制定受到一些国家对博物馆所持观点的启发，它们希望认可博物馆“作为遗产管理机构的固有的价值，并且在激励创意[……]进而增进全世界各国公民的物质和精神福祉等方面发挥着日益重要的作用”。该建议书旨在帮助博物馆履行其使命，特别是在保障和保护遗产、宣传文化多样性、传播科学知识和制定教育政策方面。
https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-concerning-protection-and-promotion-museums-and-collections-their-diversity-and-their
Time travels and touching stories
Whether they offer 3D visuals or fully immersive virtual reality, museums are revolutionizing the public's experience through the use of new technologies. But not all institutions can afford them.
Hannah McGivern
Journalist in London, UK
Museums are time machines, inviting visitors in for a close-up encounter with the treasures of history. But what if the museum gave you the chance to rummage through the storerooms, to interact with artefacts that no longer exist, or to travel to the original site where an ancient object was found? These are experiences that are now becoming possible thanks to a wave of immersive digital initiatives happening in museums around the world – and online.For some 200 years in the history of museums, a small label written by a curator was “the only technology available” to help a visitor understand the object in front of them, observes Chris Michaels, a London-based art and technology consultant and researcher. But in the last 20 years, there has been “a moment of explosion, where suddenly it’s not just words that you can put between people and objects, it’s a whole range of different technologies”.“For some 200 years, a small label written by a curator was ‘the only technology available’ to help a visitor understand the object in front of them”Loot: 10 Stories, an exhibition first held at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in September 2023, and then on view at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, harnesses the power of virtual reality (VR) to dive into the complex debate surrounding looted objects in museum collections. Wearing a VR headset, viewers are transported to an Austrian salt mine where the Nazis hid a Rembrandt self-portrait taken from a Jewish family, and to a Balinese temple, where a soldier bearing a traditional Balinese kris dagger has been killed by the Dutch colonial army. Those same objects appear physically in the gallery along with a film explaining photogrammetry, the technique used to convert 360-degree images of the items into their ultra-detailed 3D digital twins.For the guest curators, filmmaking duo Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill, VR offered a critical storytelling tool to show that “these objects had a life before, they had meaning to somebody else,” Jongsma says. “With this history of very unequal relationships and sometimes heartbreaking stories, it’s really important to pull the viewer out of the typical museum context.”“Virtual reality offers a critical storytelling tool to show that ‘these objects had a life before’”O’Neill describes the visceral sense of “simultaneity” audiences might feel in Berlin, seeing the Brandenburg Gate after witnessing, through VR, the Napoleonic invasion that took the monument’s bronze Quadriga statue as a war trophy. “You are somehow experiencing the past at the same time as the present.”Museums themselves are about learning from the past to “change the futures we might imagine,” comments Seb Chan, the Director and CEO of ACMI, Australia’s national museum of screen culture, which hosts a collection, spanning film, TV, videogames and digital art. “For me, that means you have to engage with contemporary culture, which is now inextricably intertwined with digital media, networked media and the technologies of that.”ACMI is actively exhibiting, collecting and preserving born-digital formats like VR for posterity. It also defines itself as a “multiplatform museum” with a mission to serve audiences online as well as on-site in Melbourne. The hybrid experience is encapsulated in the Lens, a cardboard disc with a microchip that visitors can tap on their favourite exhibits in the museum to explore at home later. “It’s both a souvenir and a functional item which allows you to continue your visitor journey with us,” Chan says. People have added more than 15 million items to their virtual collections since the device launched in 2021.A £5.6 million research project at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, wants to take the idea of “citizen curators” further still. With funding from the UK government, the Museums in the Metaverse project is developing a prototype digital platform that will host hundreds of 3D models of artefacts scanned from Scottish museum collections. While the average museum can only display 10 per cent of its objects to the public, “VR takes the limits off the scale of the exhibition space,” says research associate Fergus Bruce.The goal is to provide immersive VR of a kind that “digital visitors to a museum’s website don’t get to experience”, Bruce says. Users will be able to “manipulate and handle and curate” historic objects from the participating museums within virtual environments of their choosing. The platform will be “two-sided”, allowing people to create and share new VR content as well as consume it. A public version is anticipated to launch in spring 2025.There is only one downside: the price. Many institutions cannot afford expensive VR headsets and their maintenance and supervision. In comparison, mobile augmented reality (AR), which layers 3D digital visuals on top of the real world through a phone screen “has a lot of benefits,” says Thanos Kokkiniotis, CEO of the award-winning cultural travel app Smartify. “AR by its nature can be a lot more accessible and more communal.”Smartify offers web-based AR that users can access directly through their browser by scanning a QR code, without the need to download an app. “Then you can share the device with a friend and enjoy it together,” Kokkiniotis says. He describes a recent AR partnership with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which saw families huddled together while playing a historical scavenger hunt game through the building.Partnerships can help museums experiment with the latest technologies, but they should also be wary of the “hype-driven tech marketplace”, says Professor Sarah Kenderdine, who leads the Laboratory for Experimental Museology at Switzerland’s EPFL university. It specializes in large-scale digital visualizations of cultural heritage materials and data, creating 3D models and panoramic installations for exhibitions around the world.Past projects include an “interactive spatial journey” through Buddhism’s spread across Asia, based on five years of field research mapping hundreds of sites. Work is now underway on the “digital twin” of a Swiss national treasure, Louis Braun’s 10 metre-high, 100 metre-long panoramic painting of the Battle of Murten. What unites all the lab’s work is the goal to empower “new modes of public participation” in culture, Kenderdine says. “It’s about breaking down this expert knowledge.”With their vast reserves of cultural objects, documents and knowledge, museums have the potential to “drive the development of unique technologies, because they are a unique social context,” Kenderdine asserts. “They're so rare in this hyper-commercialized world – they have a set of strong values and they can drive new ideas.”A UNESCO recommendation on museums
Adopted in 2015, the Recommendation concerning the Protection and Promotion of Museums and Collections, their Diversity and their Role in Society was inspired by countries who wanted to recognize the intrinsic value of museums “as custodians of heritage, and that they also play an ever-increasing role in stimulating creativity . . . thus contributing to the material and spiritual well-being of citizens across the world”. Its aim is to help museums fulfil their mission, particularly in terms of safeguarding and protecting heritage, promoting cultural diversity, transmitting scientific knowledge and developing educational policies.
Links:
Recommendation concerning the protection and promotion of museums and collections, their diversity and their role in society
https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-concerning-protection-and-promotion-museums-and-collections-their-diversity-and-their
《这家博物馆请观众动手触摸展品》，2000年
Hands on: in this museum, touching is the rule
Link: https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/thandiwe-muriu-fairy-optical-
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