Ch. 5: Making the Museum in the Metaverse

Although it was not a metaverse-like experience, the Detroit Institute of Arts created a virtual exhibit using Matterport software to share their Ofrendas exhibit during the COVID-19 closure. The process they took to create this experience translates well to creating a metaverse experience: “We had four primary goals: Users will take away the exhibition’s ‘Big Idea’. . . Users will include those who cannot go to the exhibition in person; Bilingual users will feel supported using both Spanish and English in tandem during their experience; Navigating the experience will be intuitive. What users receive will be congruent with what they expected” (Bowyer et al., 2021, p. 78).

“Any digital initiative should have clear goals tied to the museum’s mission and business strategy. A museum’s investments in digital tools should be clearly linked to its greatest needs, whether those are supporting the daily work of staff, improving communications and marketing, enhancing the visitor experience, or optimizing business operations” (Merritt, 2021, pg16).

Strategic Partnerships & Collaborations

“To build these virtual environments, forging the right technology collaborations and finding the right vendors is key. For smaller museums, it is a challenge to collaborate with bigger names in the industry or fund such projects independently. It is their interest to first form a cohort with other museums and then work with aggregators where resources and know-how can be shared through cooperation” (Sen, 2021). Collaborations are essential, especially since resources in the metaverse can be sparse or astronomically expensive.

Decentraland.org, a metaverse platform that runs on the Ethereum blockchain, has scarcity because it only created a certain number of non-fungible “parcels” (16 meters by 16 meters) called LAND that users can purchase and trade using cryptocurrency. “LAND is a non-fungible digital asset. To ensure that the value of LAND parcels remains stable, the amount of land in Decentraland corresponds to the fixed, total amount of MANA [the cryptocurrency token of DCL]. Without LAND scarcity, many parcels would likely be left abandoned, negatively impacting the quality of content in Decentraland and the user experience” (Decentraland, 2018).

Since all parcels of LAND were sold in January 2018, the available plots of LAND are now traded between users in an in-house marketplace. At the time of this writing, I noted a parcel for sale as low as 4,775 Ethereum ($16,513,764.50 USD as of April 4th, 2022), and a parcel for sale as high as 1,000,000 Ethereum (a gargantuan number of U.S. Dollars). It should be noted that Ethereum, like all cryptocurrencies, is extremely volatile and its value can drastically change from day to day (Ethereum Price, ETH Chart, and Market Cap, n.d.). Ultimately, it would be very difficult for any museum to purchase its own parcel in Decentraland.org. Fortunately for the Toledo Museum of Art, the approximately four (4) parcels of LAND needed for their installation were generously donated for their use during the duration of the exhibition from December 2021 to May 2022. (read more about TMA's Dopplegänger project in Chapter 4).

For museums that want to take a more do-it-yourself approach than hiring a 3rd-party developer and/or designer to create a metaverse-like experience, some platforms offer less expensive ways to get started. Fortnite’s Creative mode allows anyone to build and design their own island at any time, using thousands of assets previously created and available in Unreal Engine, Epic Games’s proprietary game engine software. In 2020, Epic Games announced that Unreal Engine 5 would be coming to the Fortnite Creative mode, meaning that it is possible to upload your own assets into Fortnite Creative. The game was finally updated to Engine 5 in December 2021, meaning that your museum can add 3D models of its collections to the experience (@UnrealEngine, 2020). To make your created “island” open to the public (users who have made an Epic Games account and have downloaded Fortnite), you also need your island to go through Epic Games’s publishing approval process (Building Your First Island, n.d.).

Evaluating Success

“Designing a meaningful virtual exhibition experience requires time. . . [and] user testing, reflection, and iteration before it becomes publicly available” (Bowyer et al., 2021, p. 80). User testing and multiple iterations are also important since it is difficult to track metrics of success in the metaverse. “Particularly when participants feel invested in a project, either as contributors or as full co-creative partners, they want to do what they can to help improve and sustain the project’s growth. Participants may notice indicators that are not readily apparent to project staff, and they can offer valuable input on the most effective ways to measure and collect data related to their experiences” (Simon, 2010, pg317). Since most users are anonymous unless they identify themselves in their username, or tag themselves on another platform such as twitter, it’s difficult to follow up with users to get feedback or to send out surveys. For their metaverse experience in Decentraland, the Toledo Museum of Art added a “guest book” for users to have the option of signing in, which does help them to estimate the audience reach of Doppelgänger in Decentraland.org.

Metaverse experiences can have unexpected evidence of success, as was the case with a Petrovsky Flux, the Second Life installation published the Spencer Museum of Art between 2010 and 2016. “Over time, the Flux didn’t just attract thousands of visitors, it became one of the most popular destinations in Second Life and it made people create on a scale we hadn’t imagined. Hundreds of images showed up on photo sites all over the web, with photographers creating beautiful still interpretations of the environment. . . Explorations with technologies like the Oculus Rift headset demonstrated the remarkable possibilities of Fluxing with full 360-degree immersion” (Kirk & Strübel, 2015). Visitor participation and creation in response to the Flux illustrate Nina Simon’s idea of the “Participatory Museum.” “Developing platforms to harness, prioritizes, and present a diversity of voices around content . . . [grants] users a few specific, designed opportunities – to create their own content, [and] to prioritize the messages that resonate best for them personally – in the context of a larger overall ecosystem” (Simon, 2010, pg121). The video below shows a fan-made video compilation of the Second Life island (with a catlike avatar exploring it).

Archiving the Metaverse Exhibit

Another factor to consider with building a museum metaverse experience is archiving the exhibit itself. While your museum may be able to sustain paying for the “real-estate” to keep the exhibit live in perpetuity, the unknowns of the future of the metaverse technology itself means that the platform your experience was built on may not exist or may be drastically changed in the future. Some metaverse experiences, such as Doppelgänger in Decentraland.org (DCL), simply disappear once their run dates are over. Since the Toledo Museum of Art was donated the real-estate in DCL for their installation, but only during the duration of the exhibit from December 9th, 2021 through May 15th, 2022, the installation will disappear into the ether. A common misconception about the virtual world is that it can go on infinitely. And while it is not limited in the same ways as our physical world, it is limited in that it requires real-world resources to function, such as electricity to run online servers and money to keep those servers running.

In this way, trying to document and archive an exhibition in the metaverse is not unlike documenting a physical exhibit in your museum before deinstalling it. One way to archive a metaverse exhibit could be to simply create a detailed video recording of avatars interacting with the environment using screen capture software. Capturing video footage from a game console such as the Nintendo Switch may also require the use of a capture card, which is “a device that’s used in conjunction with a computer to capture on-screen content and encode it for playback in either a livestream or a high-quality video file. Capture cards can be used with video game consoles new and old, as well as computers and cameras” (Heckmann, 2020).

If you decide to deliver your metaverse experience in a platform like Minecraft, you have a few more options for archiving it. “[Projects in Minecraft] can be hosted as a downloadable object, a downloadable archive that you put into your PC, or it can be hosted online that people can come and visit” (Clarke, 2016).

The two images above show the interior of the Serpentine Gallery upon entering. The grey floating sculpture in the center was only viewable through augmented reality in the physical exhibition.