One day at The Sands: Exploring Las Vegas’ intangible heritage through virtual reality

The construction, negotiation and dissemination of cultural heritage in the digital era can take advantage of several approaches, including Virtual Reality (VR). Leveraging on the provision of contextualized multimedia content, VR can foster awareness about the histories of specific times and places, encouraging personal interpretative processes.This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of “One Day at the Sands”, a VR application aimed at conveying the atmosphere of one of the most famous casinos in Las Vegas from the 1950s onwards. First, we collected a digital database, including a wide range of historical material; then, we developed a presentation medium that allows viewers to navigate the virtual reconstructions and access the archival material following their curiosity and interests. User tests underlined the capability of the application to facilitate a deep and meaningful exploration of the contents reinforcing the argument that virtual reality solutions represent valuable tools to engender awareness and explorative attitudes towards heritage

The co-production of historical knowledge: implications for the history of identities

This essay argues that understanding people’s lives, emotions and intellectual reasoning is crucial to exploring national identity and that ‘the co-production of historical knowledge’ provides an approach or methodology that allows for a deeper comprehension of people’s self-identities by encouraging a diverse range of people to participate in the research process. We argue that many academic historians have maintained an intellectual detachment between university history and public and community history, to the detriment of furthering historical knowledge. We argue for a blurring of the boundaries between university and communities in exploring modern British history, and especially the history of national identities. It includes extracts of writing from community partners and a brief photographic essay of projects related to exploring identities

Social participation of families with children with autism spectrum disorder in a science museum

This article describes a qualitative research study undertaken as a collaboration between museum and occupational therapy (OT) researchers to better understand museum experiences for families with a child or children impacted by autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Inclusion for visitors with ASD is an issue that museums are increasingly considering, and the social dimension of inclusion can be particularly relevant for this audience. The construct of social participation, used in OT, provides a promising avenue for museum professionals to think about inclusion. Social participation situates social and community experiences within the context of peoples’ diverse motivations and the strategies they use to navigate environments. This study took these multiple factors into account when observing families’ museum visits—including analysis of their motivations for visiting, environmental features that influenced their visit, family strategies used before and during the visit, and the families’ definitions of a successful visit. Learning more about these factors that are associated with social participation can inform future efforts to improve museum inclusion for families with children with ASD

Multi-Sensory Museum Experiences: Balancing Objects’ Preservation and Visitors’ Learning

In the late twentieth century, museums moved from a near exclusive focus on researching, collecting and preserving objects to an increased interest in visitors’ experiences and learning. Consequently, today’s museums are re-focused on facilitating engaging connections between visitors and collections. Nonetheless, many current-day museum visitors are dissatisfied with their primarily visual experiences. In order to enhance visitors’ intellectual, emotional and physical connections with objects, this paper argues museums should introduce new ways of visitor interaction with objects through narrative and multi-sensory experiences. By combining discursive and immersive exhibition models, museums can create narratives that emotionally and intellectually involve visitors. While museums should aim to make visitors’ museum experiences more immersive by incorporating senses in addition to sight, such as touch, hearing, smell and taste, museums must also protect the integrity of their collections. Through a tiered or stratified approach to collections, museums may remain responsible for their collections yet allow visitors to increase their physical, emotional and intellectual access to more diverse types of objects. This paper demonstrates how museums may implement discursive and immersive narratives as well as tiered or stratified, multi-sensory collection experiences in permanent installations, temporary exhibitions and educational programming

Multi-Sensory Museum Experiences: Balancing Objects’ Preservation and Visitors’ Learning

In the late twentieth century, museums moved from a near exclusive focus on researching, collecting and preserving objects to an increased interest in visitors’ experiences and learning. Consequently, today’s museums are re-focused on facilitating engaging connections between visitors and collections. Nonetheless, many current-day museum visitors are dissatisfied with their primarily visual experiences. In order to enhance visitors’ intellectual, emotional and physical connections with objects, this paper argues museums should introduce new ways of visitor interaction with objects through narrative and multi-sensory experiences. By combining discursive and immersive exhibition models, museums can create narratives that emotionally and intellectually involve visitors. While museums should aim to make visitors’ museum experiences more immersive by incorporating senses in addition to sight, such as touch, hearing, smell and taste, museums must also protect the integrity of their collections. Through a tiered or stratified approach to collections, museums may remain responsible for their collections yet allow visitors to increase their physical, emotional and intellectual access to more diverse types of objects. This paper demonstrates how museums may implement discursive and immersive narratives as well as tiered or stratified, multi-sensory collection experiences in permanent installations, temporary exhibitions and educational programming

Industrial Heritage Buildings in Cyprus; Spatial Experience of the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre

This study focuses on the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre [NiMAC] in Nicosia, one of the prominent historical industrial buildings in Cyprus, which has been re-functionalized as an art centre. The overall goal of this study is to examine and clarify the human experience of the NiMAC building as part of one’s lifeworld. The main argument of the research is that proposing an effective research design for examining how a person distinguishes the components of a re-used building is possible by human responses to architecture rather than focusing on the physical aesthetics of it. Hence, the purpose of the study is to make a multi-sensory analysis to grasp how a person develops an emotional attitude in the re-functioned space which can be the core assessment of the adaptive re-use purposes. In this context, this research basically explores the main research question which is about what spatial experiences the NiMAC building is offering to people after it is re-functioned when space is experienced in a multisensory approach. Methodologically, this research design is basically created by the hybrid use of first-person, existential, and hermeneutic tactics of the phenomenological approach