Design and Development Approach for an Interactive Virtual Museum with Haptic Glove Technology

With a rise in the use Virtual Reality (VR) applications in museums and exhibition displays, digital heritage has still shown limitations in what a visitor can experience from the intersection of technology and history. Traditionally, interpretative narrative within the museum has been communicated through text panels offering limited context from a largely connoisseurly perspective. In addition to these interactive digital resources are often data base orientated via touch screen technologies with no multisensory immersion. This paper addresses the digital changes in these educational landscapes and the way it is being handled to co-create digital tools for exhibitions to educate and entertain museum visitors. This paper explores the use of haptic technology in conjunction with virtual reality to facilitate multi-faceted modes of interpretation, that offer novel access to an artefact's history from a range of perspectives. It also provides evidence of increased visitor engagement with a ceramic display through these immersive methods to communicate a narrative. This research bridges the gap between history and technology to offer an immersive experience of visiting a museum virtually and providing an intimate one-one experience to interact with artefacts and learn about history. As its focus, this research digitally reconstructs a collection of East-Asian ceramics bequeathed by Ernest Thornhill in 1944 to North Staffordshire Technical College (Now known as Staffordshire University). The digital prototype was developed to replicate the museum environment without the restrictions to access artefacts and handle them. This experience offers visual insights to contextualise the history of a ceramic to be utlised as an education tool to enhance learning within a museum setting. Evidence showed a significantly positive response to this prototype in museum and gallery settings, responses revealed these methods of interaction did assist in learning about ceramics, with a distinct majority of participants confirming these installations would encourage future visits, shaping the possibilities of how history can be combined with technology to create new and innovative solutions to learn about an artefact.