How to develop engaging virtual museum tours

7th October 2024

During the Covid lockdowns when we were stuck inside, museums and heritage institutions embraced virtual tours and exhibitions as a way to continue engaging people. We might not have been able to physically attend, but these organisations continued to educate and wow audiences from the comfort of their own homes.

Tate Britain, Musée d’Orsay and the Natural History Museum all created fantastic virtual museum experiences, offering people the chance to view artworks and interact with exhibits, while you could even be guided around the Natural History Museum’s Hintze Hall—home to ‘Hope’, the skeleton of a blue whale—by Sir David Attenborough.   

Lockdown might feel like a distant memory, but there are still lots of reasons museums and art galleries should consider creating virtual tours.

What is a virtual museum tour?

A virtual museum tour, or standalone virtual exhibition, involves more than simply making images and videos accessible online.

They should be immersive and engaging, putting the ‘visitor’ into a virtual space. They don’t necessarily need to be viewed with a virtual reality headset but, as you’ll see in the examples below, they should offer a degree of interactivity to make sure it’s not just a passive experience.

READ MORE: Interactive Museum Exhibits 101

Virtual museum tour examples

The British Museum offers a number of 360° videos, including the chance to explore Queen Victoria’s Indian-inspired Durbar room and architect Zaha Hadid’s internationally acclaimed project ‘The Peak’.

One of the most exciting is the deep-dive into Pieter Bruegel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels.

This virtual reality experience provides a detailed explanation of the painting, and allows you to look closely at the many details hidden within.

The Vatican Museums also offer you the chance to beat those large crowds with a number of virtual tours, including of Raphael’s Rooms, Pio Clementino Museum and the Sistine Chapel.

The benefits of offering virtual museum experiences

Pandemics aren’t the only reason for museums to offer virtual museum experiences.

Making collections and exhibits more widely accessible

Virtual museum tours bring your collections and exhibits to a wide, international audience, while  also making them more accessible for people with disabilities.

Supports preservation

 Museum curators often find themselves trying to strike the balance between making artefacts and artworks accessible, and preserving them within a suitable environment. It’s great to see these things in the flesh, but every time they’re moved and exposed to the real world, there’s a risk of damage.

Virtual exhibitions allow curators to showcase these works without risking their physical integrity.

Attract more visitors

You might be worried thatvirtual tours will mean fewer people actually come to your museum. However, they can actually have the opposite effect.

Not only do these virtual experiences boost website traffic, they lead to increased awareness and, ultimately, more footfall.

READ MORE: How the use of Augmented Reality in Museums is bringing collections to life

How to create a virtual museum tour

There are a number of considerations and steps you need to take in order to develop an engaging virtual museum tour.

1. Understand what you’re trying to achieve
2. What do your ‘visitors’ want to get out of it?
3. How and where do you want to publish your virtual experiences?
4. Identify the content assets required
5. Invest in the right tech

Understand what you’re trying to achieve

Before you invest time and money in creating a virtual museum experience, think about what you’re actually trying to achieve.

Do you want to give the exhibition as wide an audience as possible? Do you want to drive more traffic to the website? Do you want to attract more visitors to the museum? Once you understand the goals of the project you’ll be more likely to curate experiences that achieve them.

What do your ‘visitors’ want to get out of this?

Who is this virtual experience for, and why would they be interested in it? Don’t get lost in your own objectives and remember your main goal is to entertain and educate the public. 

Put some time into creating profiles of different visitor demographics, including what they’re interested in, how they like to learn and what sort of content would be suitable for their age. You should enhance this with real visitor research via questionnaires and reviews. Working on this before you develop the virtual tour will ensure you’re creating a visitor-focused experience.

How and where do you want to publish your virtual experiences?

What format of content are you producing, and where do you want to host it? Will you publish it to your YouTube channel, a mobile app, the museum’s website or a gated platform users have to log in to? Will it also be available to people who do actually visit the museum? And how will this tie in with the physical exhibitions and experiences available? 

The key question to ask is what will be most accessible to the target audience.

Identify the content assets required

Figure out what content assets you need to create and who’s responsible for curating it. Will the tour leverage static images or video? Will you need to record audio to accompany it? You’ll also need to consider the assets required for promoting the virtual tour online and offline.

It will also help if you storyboard the full experience before creating the digital content assets. Map out the complete journey a user will follow and detail what assets will be needed at each stage.

Invest in the right tech

To create an immersive virtual museum tour you’re going to have to invest in the right technology, both to create the assets but also store them.

Virtual museum experiences require high definition imagery, video and audio, which means you’ll need access to quality recording equipment. You might also need to invest in software designed specifically for creating virtual environments.

All of that digital content will also need to be stored, organised and managed correctly, and this is where a Digital Asset Management platform like ResourceSpace comes in.

How Digital Asset Management supports virtual museum tours

Virtual museum tours require a lot of digital content, but without a Digital Asset Management system, where are you going to store it?

File storage solutions like Google Drive or SharePoint aren’t up to the task of managing and organising the digital assets of arts and heritage institutions, which is why so many museums are using ResourceSpace.

READ MORE: Case Study - ResourceSpace + The Ashmolean Museum

Ready to find out more about how ResourceSpace supports museums in bringing their collections to life? Get in touch today. Alternatively, book your free, no obligation demo below to see the software in action and get an idea of how it can be used to support your virtual museum tours.