[un]box
A Kiosk of Wonder
Over 90% of museum objects are not on display. Instead they are found in stores and collections that are inaccessible to the general public. Museums in the Metaverse is seeking to address this by providing a platform that not only hosts these objects to the highest fidelity as digital artefacts but allows curators, designers and the general public to place them inside bespoke immersive environments.
How do you exhibit these within a physical space though?
Far rather than a clunky headset and PC floating in space within a museum, wires dangling everywhere, University of Glasgow commissioned Lateral North to develop a kiosk that both presented this future technology and could look at home in museums, cultural institutions and civic locations.
(un)box was the physical manifestation of this design brief. Fabricated by Sculpture+Design, the Museums in the Metaverse kiosk was crafted to both conceal the wealth of technologies it contains as well as be adaptable as it evolves and rolls out.
To date (un)box has travelled the length and breadth of the United Kingdom with St Giles Cathedral and the National Portrait Gallery some of the locations to showcase these digital artefacts and environments alongside the kiosk, allowing them to (un)box wonder.
What the Unbox achieves is it gives a visual presence to people coming to visit, that there is something here to see. It doesn’t immediately look like this is just VR or just for kids or something like that. It’s intriguing to all ages. And when they get to see it, they’re drawn to it, and they come and they want to explore and they want to see it. And what that does is it drives people to the thing we really want to show them, which is the VR content that the Unbox enables.
Neil McDonnell, Professor of Philosophy and XR Technology
