Lightning Talk

Saturday, April 04, 2020: 2:00pm - 3:30pm -

Arul Baskaran, Museum for Applied Arts and Sciences, Australia

With many museums worldwide now embarking on large-scale collection digitisation projects, some of the questions raised are: what is the purpose of digitisation, how will the data be used within museums, and how will the public be able to access it?

For the Powerhouse Museum’s recent Apollo 11 exhibition, we created a new VR experience which takes visitors inside the Columbia Command Module, which carried the astronauts to the Moon and back in 1969. Developed in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution who provided a 3D model and University of New South Wales’ iCinema team, the experience was produced on a very small budget and timescale but has rapidly become an exhibition favourite.

In this talk we will discuss our motivation and goals, development process, implementation, successes, and learnings from the Apollo 11 VR project.