XEngaging the Public During a Worldwide Pandemic: A Critique of the Virtual Museum Tour

  • Erin Dietrick, The George Washington University

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, museums and historic sites were among the first institutions to close their doors to the public. According to the report generated by the International Council of Museums during the period between April 7th and May 7th, almost 95% of museums around the world had closed as of April 2020.1 With no knowledge of when the world may return to a familiar sense of normality, museums faced an unprecedented challenge to overcome. While many museums had been experimenting with virtual tours and programming prior to the pandemic, the immediate shift to fully online engagement was a monumental moment that posed the unique obstacle to transfer almost all in-person engagement over to a virtual format. As people across the country simmered within a mutual sense of boredom and anxiety, many searched for a way to occupy themselves during the long days of isolation. For the curious learner and history buff alike, virtual museum tours became an increasingly popular pastime.

In this essay, I aim to explore one of the ways that museums shifted to engage their audience within the limits set by the COVID-19 pandemic — the virtual tour. Drawing from my own personal experience as a quarantined distance-learner, I will focus intently on multiple aspects of the virtual museum tour, including the relationship between the virtual museum and the in-person museum, the successes and shortcomings of this form of the museum experience and the implications of the virtual museum on public engagement. In order to do this, I will look specifically at virtual tours offered by Ford’s Theatre and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, two very different tours that both highlight positive and negative aspects of the virtual museum experience.

The pandemic not only attracted a historic amount of traction on websites offering virtual tours, but the result of this immediate popularity forced museums and their programming teams to more closely examine the way they were virtually engaging their audiences. While in any “normal” period of time the virtual museum tour exists as an appendage or an added bonus to the physical space, it effectively became a complete replacement for the museum experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. With this in mind, it may not be completely reasonable to critically compare the virtual tour directly against the in-person experience. A virtual replica of a physical space will likely never be the same experience, so, to be fair, it should not be judged by the same parameters.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of visitor engagement to virtual museums during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to being by setting these parameters by which the virtual museum experience is to be analyzed. This study will focus more directly on the museum as both a source of casual entertainment as well as a space of knowledge transfer. The two often go hand-in-hand, as visitors are more likely to interact with and absorb information presented to them in an entertaining or amusing way. To apply the concept of immersive storytelling to the museum, we can consider the museum experience to be somewhat of a performance.2 This element of storytelling can be seen within the Mount Vernon virtual tour through the videos available to watch within the different areas of the historic site.3 These videos feature a number of different historical reenactors (including Washington himself) as well as contemporary experts and Mount Vernon employees that add interest and context to the storyline of the historic site as a home, plantation, distillery, and more. Museums are effectively the storytellers of history; a place where visitors could go and immerse themselves into the stories of the people and places of the past. Given this, we can think of the effectiveness of the museum experience in terms of how well it has taken the visitor through its intended narrative or story. This can be measurable by looking at how well the visitor is engaged within the experience and how much and what information they ultimately take away from their exploration of the museum. It is important to note that interest and engagement looks different in every museum visitor, as certain methods of displaying information will work better for some people than others. Everyone has a unique way in which they absorb and learn new things, which speaks to the difficulty of creating a universally engaging virtual museum tour.

To begin by laying down a foundation of what exactly I am referring to, there are a number of different meanings to consider when we discuss the “virtual museum,” from virtual programming and events held on platforms like Skype and Zoom, to pre-recorded lectures and tours by museum professionals, and even to game-type activities held on the museum’s website. For this essay, I will focus on the virtual museum tour that consists of the museum’s physical space constructed out of a series of photos strung together to give the viewer the illusion of actually exploring within that space.

One of the most prevalent platforms that features a vast selection of virtual museum tours is Google Arts and Culture. Google Arts and Culture originally launched in 2011 under the name Google Art Project, and was created with the intent to make museum spaces and art pieces more accessible to a wider audience. Within the original format of the website, now also an App, users were able to virtually tour galleries from around the world, with the unique ability to zoom in on pieces of artwork featured at that museum. Contemporary advertisements and reviews of the website commonly mention this feature, often remarking on how captivating it was to be able to see the artists’ brush strokes — an aspect of artwork that perhaps is unavailable in its in-person viewing counterpart.4 The original launch included material from seventeen partner museums, all of which were highly successful and well-known institutions from either Europe or the United States. For the most part, the general mission of Google Arts and Culture and the technologies behind virtual museum walk-throughs have stayed largely the same since their conception in 2011. The website does now offer a wider variety of interactives, ranging from games and “experiments” to selfie / photo filter opportunities where the user can “try on” a piece of artwork or find out which classical painting they look most similar to.

Google Arts and Culture utilizes the same technology used to create the Street View function on Google Maps. This 360° camera technology is not unique to Google, however, as there are a number of other privately owned companies utilizing this same concept of sticking together panoramic images to create a 3D simulated model of a museum space. One such company is Hullfilms, created by Brandon Hull and currently operating out of Idaho.5 Hullfilms, in contrast to many of the virtual tours offered on Google Arts & Culture, does present coinciding captions and more user-friendly arrows within their tours. For example, their virtual tour of George Washington’s Mount Vernon was notably engaging to myself as a casual viewer, offering specialized videos and other interactives within different areas of the house.

When the first wave of COVID-19 shutdowns affected the United States in the spring of 2020, one of the most common articles I saw were pieces titled along the lines of: “Need something to do? Here’s 5 museums you can visit from your couch.” As someone who has always loved history and been interested in museum studies, I easily fell into the rabbit hole of virtual museum programming. The first virtual museum tour I was compelled to explore was Ford’s Theatre, a historic site I visited years ago in person. This gave me a unique perspective on my virtual experience, having also previously visited the same space in-person. The virtual tour offered by Ford’s Theatre through Google Arts and Culture is unique in that it is presented as a virtual exhibit rather than simply a virtual tour.6 Instead of the visitor being able to freely explore the space like they would in many other virtual tours offered by Google Arts and Culture, Ford’s Theatre has created a specific path that the visitor is taken on, similar to guided tour. This begins in the Theatre itself, moving onwards to the Petersen House where Lincoln ultimately died, and ending in the exhibit spaces that display artifacts from Lincoln’s presidency and assassination. This curated path makes for a very effective storyline, as the visitor is taken chronologically through the events of the tragedy at Ford’s Theatre. Each new page of the tour provides a short paragraph detailing the significance of the space, its role in Lincoln’s assassination, and contemporary context on how museum and theater goers experience these spaces today.

Within each stop on the guided virtual tour of Ford’s Theatre, the visitor is able to move throughout that space utilizing the aforementioned Google 360° degree camera technology. For spaces like the Theatre and the Petersen House, this is a particularly immersive and effective element, as it enables the visitor to feel almost as if they were actually there in that space. I would argue that this does not work as well within the exhibit spaces, however, as the exhibits themselves tend to get slightly distorted in image and difficult to read. I found myself struggling to read most of the text on the walls, and I similarly struggled to position myself virtually to get a closer look at the artifacts that caught my eye within the museum. The tour does highlight a few key artifacts, such as the replica of Lincoln’s funeral train car, mourning cards, and the gun carried by John Wilkes Booth through Virginia after he fled Ford’s Theatre that night. However, I do wish the visitor was given more opportunities to engage with a larger number of the artifacts within the museum. I found myself frustrated that I could see certain pieces on display, but I wasn’t able to read the captions associated with them or zoom in to get a closer look as I would be able to do in person. The exhibit space was also notably challenging to navigate, as the non-descriptive gray arrows that when clicked on lead the visitor to a different area of the space can be very confusing. This is a technical issue I noticed often within Google Arts and Culture virtual tours, and in my experience, I am often left going in circles and struggling to remember which direction I came from or was going towards.

In contrast to my confusion within the Ford’s Theater tour, I found Hullfilms’ tour of George Washington’s Mount Vernon to be impressively easily to navigate with the addition of numerous opportunities for further engagement. One very simple yet incredibly effective element of this tour is seen within the arrows the visitor clicks on to move to a different space. When you hover over these arrows, text pops up with a description of the area that that arrows leads to. On the landing page of the virtual tour, the visitor is placed directly in the middle of the front lawn of Mount Vernon. From here, you can turn yourself 360° to begin by exploring all the different areas you have the option to go to next, for example, “To the Gardner’s House,” “To the Kitchen,” or “To the Study.” Not only does this provide the visitor with a better idea of their virtual surroundings and what they can expect on their tour, but I would also argue that this element keeps the visitor more engaged and excited about their experience. Having an idea of the different rooms and areas of the site in the back of my head while exploring made me more enticed to continue on with the tour. While I was exploring this site, I additionally found myself particularly grateful for the location index on the left side of the screen, which allows the visitor to jump to different spots throughout Mount Vernon without back tracking or getting lost. These navigational elements of the Mount Vernon virtual tour are incredibly beneficial to the overall experience, and make for a much more seamless and enjoyable virtual exploration.

Another aspect of Hullfilms’ Mount Vernon tour that stands out as an excellent element of the virtual museum experience is the ability to click on specific objects and artifacts in order to get a closer look and learn more about them. As I mentioned earlier within the discussion of 360° camera technology within exhibit spaces, one of the most frustrating issues within the most of the virtual museum tours presented on Google Arts and Culture is the user’s inability to read the wall captions associated with the objects displayed in the space. Without this context applied to the objects the visitor is looking at, a significant part of the story is lost. We see this especially within history museums as we consider how meaning is assigned to otherwise ordinary objects. This problem is effectively solved within the Mount Vernon tour, as clicking on objects marked with a white circle will pop up a larger, clearer photo of the artifact along with a description of its significance, provenance, and specific connection to the context of George Washington and his home. Just in Washington’s study alone, the visitor is able to engage closer with artifacts like the iron chest that held 50% of Washington’s wealth, the portrait of Lawrence Washington, and my personal favorite — the fan chair that kept Washington cool during hot Virginia summers. Without the ability to click on these objects and read more about them, I would have passed them by without a second thought and missed out on some really fascinating information and stories.

Moving into the future, museums should continue to more intently acknowledge the barriers that may prevent people from coming in physically to their space and consider ways in which they can continue to engage with people from a distance. Museums are a space that ideally are meant for everyone and encouraging of the widest possible audience they can reach. The pandemic was a unique opportunity for museum professionals to critically examine how people who are unable to physically engage within the space can still experience the museum. This has implications even as we move past the era the COVID-19, as there will always be limitations that hinder in-person engagement. We will need to reassess the relationship between the in-person experience and virtual museum, so that they may more effectively co-exist and actually compliment each other rather than existing as two separate entities from each other.

As I write this piece, the COVID-19 pandemic has persisted into yet another wave of cases across the world as the Delta variant continues to spread rapidly. It is impossible to say when the world might return the pre-2020 “normal” we were all so accustomed to. With this in mind, I think it may be time to accept that perhaps we will never return the way things once were, and instead of longing for that familiar sense of the past, we need to begin looking towards the future as an opportunity to apply all that we have learned throughout the past 18 months. This is especially true for museum professionals working within the engagement and programming sphere. As museums historically have shown us, the past can be a great indicator of what’s to come in the future, and as the pandemic has shown us, our world can be shaken up and turned on its head in a matter of days. Perhaps what is most important moving forward is the ability to adapt, persist, and consistently implement creative ideas and ways in which we can further engage the public. This is no simple task, and as we have seen though the examples of George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Ford’s Theatre, virtual tours can ultimately be an excellent opportunity to bring museums to visitors when outstanding circumstances prevent in-person engagement. I look forward to the ways future museum professionals continue to build upon the successes of the virtual museum as well as improve upon the areas that could make the virtual tour even better.

Notes

  1. ICOM, “Survey: Museums, Museum Professionals and COVID-19,” Accessed October 22, 2021. https://icom.museum/en/covid-19/surveys-and-data/survey-museums-and-museum-professionals/. ↩︎

  2. Chan, Seb “On Sleep No More, Magic and Immersive Storytelling,” Fresh and New(er), May 23, 2012. https://www.freshandnew.org/2012/05/sleep-more-magic-immersive-storytelling/. ↩︎

  3. HULLFILM, “Virtual Tour - George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” Accessed September 21, 2021. https://virtualtour.mountvernon.org/. ↩︎

  4. Smith, Roberta “The Work of Art in the Age of Google,” The New York Times, February 6, 2011, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/arts/design/07google.html. ↩︎

  5. HULLFILM, “HOW WE WORK,” Accessed October 8, 2021. https://hullfilm.com/how-we-work/. ↩︎

  6. Google Arts & Culture, “Virtual Tour of Ford’s Theatre - Ford’s Theatre,” Accessed November 12, 2021. https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/virtual-tour-of-ford-s-theatre/ZQKyBULuUzepJw. ↩︎