Digital and immersive devices are proliferating in museums and places of remembrance, responding both to growing visitor demand for more experiential mediation and to the need for institutions to make their collections more accessible. However, this development raises a key question: to what extent can these mediations be studied, both upstream in their design and in terms of their impact on the public experience and their scientific relevance? What’s more, how can we build bridges between these immersive practices and academic research to ensure that these devices are not limited to a mere technological “attraction”, but genuinely enrich the understanding of the works and events commemorated?
The study of digital devices in museums cannot be reduced to purely technical or financial criteria. It must be part of a broader approach to the analysis of public uses, involving multidisciplinary research combining museology, cognitive sciences, information and communication sciences, sociology and new technologies. In this way, cultural institutions position themselves not only as places of dissemination, but also as laboratories for experimentation, where visitor feedback and scientific observations contribute to the co-construction of more relevant and better-adapted systems.
This is particularly true of the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame and the Verdun Memorialwhich, during a webinar organized by Museum Connections (see the replay), shared their experiences, showing us how their immersive tools have been designed or adjusted on the basis of scientific research, to better meet visitor expectations and optimize their impact in terms of mediation.
1. Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame: From digital experimentation to sustainability, mediation enhanced by scientific analysis of usage
The Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame in Strasbourg, rooted in the history of medieval and Renaissance art, faces a major challenge: making accessible works that require constant recontextualization for heterogeneous audiences. Faced with this requirement, the museum has seized the opportunity of digital technology to enrich its mediation practices. As early as 2015, an initial virtual reality device, developed with the company Inventive Studio, simulated the ascent of Strasbourg Cathedral, meeting with immediate success and giving impetus to the continuation of this approach.
This initial success led to an ambitious expansion of the project in 2022, with the introduction of eighteen varied digital devices – virtual reality, holograms, augmented reality, 3D filters, and other immersive tools in a journey named Le numérique À l’Oeuvre. This plurality of technologies meets a dual requirement: to offer educational tools adapted to the works of art, while respecting the demands of rigorous scientific mediation. Thus, the technologies chosen are calibrated to enrich the reading of the works, whether they be imposing immersive devices or more discreet solutions, such as the projection of architectural contours to contextualize displaced statues. Developed in partnership with Inventive Studio, who already had a model of the cathedral at their disposal via an in-house architect, this tour is in keeping with the logic of reusing existing data, reducing costs while maximizing the relevance of the devices.
However, integrating these technologies into the museum experience is not without its challenges. Maïlys Liautard, Public Assessment Manager, led a rigorous scientific study between May and November 2022, aimed at measuring the impact of these schemes. The study, combining observations, interviews and questionnaires, revealed some key findings. On the one hand, although the digital devices are highly attractive – with 200,000 uses – they are not a driving force for visits by audiences less familiar with museums. Secondly, the immersive experience is correlated not with socio-cultural factors, but rather with visitors’ affinity with digital technology. This reveals a divide in expectations of mediation, where the individual’s relationship to the digital takes precedence over traditional demographic characteristics.
This scientific evaluation process has enabled us to strategically rationalize our digital devices. Some have been abandoned, due to lack of relevance or recurring technical failures, while others have been simplified to maximize their effectiveness. A particularly interesting aspect from a mediation point of view is the careful analysis of each device to measure its fit between mediation objectives and the results obtained. For example, the study revealed that a virtual reality device, although a great success with visitors, distracted attention from the collections and interpretative intentions of the room in which it was installed. Following this evaluation, 12 of the 18 devices were permanently integrated into the permanent collections, reinforcing their role in interpreting and enhancing the works.
This policy is also part of a broader framework of reflection, illustrated by a study day organized in October 2022 by the Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg. This event brought together experts in museology and information and communication sciences to explore the complex challenges of digital mediation in museums and heritage sites. Researchers from renowned institutions (Sorbonne-Nouvelle / LabEx ICCA, Université d’Angers / LERIA, Avignon Université / Centre Norbert Elias, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 / LERASS, Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France / LARSH) crossed their perspectives with those of professionals in the field, notably the conservation team at the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame and mediation managers at the Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg. This fruitful dialogue between academic research and museum practice, enriched by feedback from audience surveys, helped refine digital mediation approaches, paving the way for more coherent practices anchored in a genuine dynamic of ongoing evaluation.
Ultimately, the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame’s experience shows that digital technology can enrich museum mediation, provided it is carefully evaluated and adjusted. This experimental approach, guided by scientific analyses of public usage, has enabled us to maintain a balance between technology and human mediation. This model underlines the need for thoughtful digital integration, where devices do not replace the museum experience, but complement it, while respecting the singularity of works and audiences.
This reflection on digital immersion takes on a new dimension in the context of places of remembrance, such as the Verdun Memorial. Here, immersive mediation not only enriches the experience, it becomes an essential tool for prolonging the transmission of memory, raising major ethical and symbolic issues that university research is helping to resolve.
2. Immersive experiences and memorial mediation: the case of the Verdun Memorial
The Verdun Memorial poses a fundamental challenge in the mediation of contemporary conflicts: how to convey the experience of war, while respecting the memory of people, events and places? This is a particularly sensitive issue when it comes to the First World War, a conflict whose social, human and political repercussions are still very much alive (20 million dead and 21 million wounded). The challenge for a place of remembrance such as Verdun is twofold: to engage visitors emotionally, without betraying historical reality or lapsing into spectacular decontextualization. It was in this context that the integration of an immersive device to prolong the transmission of memory was considered.
But first, a quick contextualization of the mediation issues at Verdun. Since the end of the war, Verdun has been marked by a determination to preserve the remains, restore the land and commemorate, highlighted by the reforestation of over 6,000 hectares between 1927 and 1934. This preservation effort is not insignificant: it aims to preserve the physical traces of the conflict to pass on to future generations. However, as Nicolas Czubak, Scientific Director of the Mémorial de Verdun, points out, the contrast between this peaceful forest and the distressing accounts of the war calls for a system capable of linking these two realities.
As Janaïne Golonka, a research and development engineer in cultural innovation, pointed out, the use of immersion in memorial devices is not new. In her thesis on Immersive Experiences and Memorial Mediations (in which she studied the Verdun device), she looks back at various devices. Since the post-war period, techniques such as dioramas, panoramas and stereoscopic images have been used to immerse the public in the atmosphere of battlefields. However, these representations have often reflected cultural differences in the way memory is transmitted: where the French favor a solemn approach, the Anglo-Saxons opt for more narrative and spectacular content, as evidenced by recent productions such as Ghosts of Thiepval (by the BBC) or Empire Soldiers (Studio MBD).
Faced with these challenges, what were the choices made by the Mémorial de Verdun, which in 2021 is introducing an innovative immersive device, developed by Luxembourg studio 3WG, that uses virtual reality to immerse visitors in the historic landscape of Verdun? This immersive experience, entitled VERDUN – Paysage de guerre – Paysage de paix, offers a comparative experience in four stages, enabling visitors to observe the evolution of the battlefield before, during and after the war. Thanks to an aerial view simulating observation from a balloon, visitors symbolically fly over the landscape, transformed over the decades. Far from focusing on the horror of the fighting, this experience highlights the transformation of the site, today marked by the forest that covers the traces of the battles.
Located on the second floor of the Memorial with a panoramic view of the surrounding forest, the immersive experience is accessible via four freely available virtual reality headsets. The project was co-financed by the European Union, via the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. Lasting six minutes, it provides a striking reconstruction of the area before, during and after the fighting. It not only shows the scars of the past, but also highlights the regeneration of the landscape, combining memory and resilience.
As Janaïne Golonka analyzes in her thesis, immersive reconstructions of events such as the First World War raise complex questions – perfectly illustrated by the Verdun experience. Far from being neutral, immersion engages a process of transmission that blends memory, emotion and identity. What the device shows, but also what it omits, influences the visitor’s perception and can transform the way he or she represents the conflict. This transformative potential raises the question of how immersive experiences contribute to the rewriting and updating of historical events.
A way of questioning the role of the visitor in this process? “The painting is as much made by the viewer as by the artist.” By transposing Marcel Duchamp’s idea to the field of memorial mediation, the immersive experience would not be limited to the reconstitution of the past, but would become a co-construction between the device and the personal experience of each visitor.
The virtual reality system at the Verdun Memorial has been used more than 200,000 times since its launch, with a particularly positive reception from visitors of all ages. This unexpected success with older generations shows that immersion is not just for young visitors. Fully integrated into the tour itinerary, and strategically located at the end, VR devices offer a new perspective on Verdun’s historic landscape, enabling a comparative approach between eras and a symbolic overview of the site. The real challenge lies in the ability of these devices to create a balanced mediation between memory, education and emotion.
In conclusion, the experiences at the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame and the Mémorial de Verdun illustrate the need for a thoughtful, science-based approach to enriching cultural mediation. These cases demonstrate that, while offering significant added value to the visitor experience, digital integration must be accompanied by ongoing evaluation and adaptation to audience expectations. They also underline the importance of establishing synergistic links between museum institutions and the world of research, thus ensuring that mediation is not merely a technological innovation, but a genuine vehicle for understanding and transmitting heritage.
Baudouin Duchange
| Further information: – Nicolas Navarro and Lise Renaud, “Vos publics derrière la donnée” : une nouvelle économie de l’évaluation”, Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication [En ligne], 27 | 2023, online December 01, 2023, accessed September 24, 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/15056; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.15056 – Dominique Gélinas, “Le sensorium synthétique : réflexion sur l’utilisation de l’expographie immersive numérique et muséale”, Conserveries mémorielles [En ligne], #16 | 2014, online September 25, 2014, accessed September 27, 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cm/2000 L’expérience de visite dans les expositions scientifiques et techniques à scénographie d’immersion by Florence Belaën – Pre-testing a digital device for the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac: starting from the uses and expectations of your audiences to develop a tool to aid the visit. L’oeil du Public (October 2022) – Link – L’émotion dans les expositions – Culture&Musées Edited by Gaëlle Crenn and Jean-Christophe Vilatte – L’usage de la borne d’écoute par conduction osseuse Losonnante par les publics déficients sensoriels dans les lieux de patrimoine. Phase 1: Prefiguration survey. METIS LAB for Lossonante in 2022. Link. – Cristina Badulescu and Jessica de Bideran, “Les publics des musées et institutions culturelles à l’ère du numérique”, Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication [Online], 27 | 2023, online December 01, 2023, accessed September 24, 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/14721 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.14721 – Study of audiences around the theme of space and the uses of immersive digital tools. METIS LAB for Universcience in 2022. See link. |
