Within the walls of York Gaol: Memory, Place and the Immersive Museum

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The work proposed here is a collaboration between York Museums Trust (YMT) and an interdisciplinary team of researchers based at the University of York's EPSRC funded Digital Creativity Labs that seeks to address the major challenges to implementation of immersive experiences for engagement with cultural heritage. We will design and implement an experimental mobile Virtual Reality (VR) experience for YMT-run York Castle Museum that blends immersive, collaborative and place-based storytelling with physical experiences of objects and built space.Objects held by museums have the capacity to play an integral role in the formation of personal and communal identity. Through the objects in their care, regional social history museums help visitors to connect meaningfully to the experiences of past people and to develop greater attachments to place by means of personal reflection. Using a research-through-design methodology we will develop a VR experience to enrich and guide group explorations of the 18th Century York Castle Prison which is now YMT-managed York Castle Museum. The experimental exploration will reflect new curatorial priorities of York Castle Museum by finding ways to weave issues of contemporary social relevance including debt and detention into the interpretation of the prison. The VR experience will tell stories of the impact of debt on the lives of past York residents; an issue of great contemporary resonance. It will focus on relatable stories of everyday people evidenced in the archives and collections of YMT and not currently presented within existing interpretation at the Castle Museum. Using VR, imagined memories of past residents of York prison based on existing archival research will be staged within the prison space. Flexible narrative structures will enable a single story to be explored and revealed through a variety of pathways through the space. Inspired by highly successful experiments during the development of VikingVR (http://www.york.ac.uk/vikingvr), the narrative structure of the VR will encourage people to share VR masks and to engage with and explore the prison space and objects around them, transforming the prison into a collaborative and highly social, mixed reality experience. The design, implementation and evaluation of this proof of concept will enable the research team to begin to develop responses to three underlying research problems which are of relevance across the creative industries: 1) Underdeveloped narrative media for VR. The development of engaging narrative forms for VR has represented one of the main obstacles to the widespread acceptance of VR as a medium and has delayed its integration into the fabric of exhibition design. 2) Hardware does not exist to deploy these technologies within a museum setting. Current technologies are not robust enough for unattended or fully integrated museum use. They are not designed to offer the kinds of social, collaborative experiences which people expect and which museums want to deliver. 3) Inadequate curatorial strategies for VR. VR is a distinct medium with very specific affordances. Integrating this technology into the museum experience represents a major challenge which, if addressed could revolutionise the delivery of storytelling in a museum context. The VR experience will be co-designed by a team of archaeology, digital heritage, interaction design and technology, and human computer interaction researchers working with museum staff and community representatives already engaged in the redevelopment of the Castle Museum. The proposed work will inform the ongoing development process for the Castle Museum, with the VR experience acting as a prototype for fully realised permanent digital immersive installations as part of the redevelopment of Castle Museum between 2018 and 2022. We will also use this research as an opportunity to build our collaboration and to further examine priorities for future funded research.