# Virtual Reality in Museums: Exploring the Experiences of Museum Professionals
## 5 Perceived Advantages and Challenges of Using VR Technologies  
### Perceived Advantages  
In order to better understand the use of VR in the targeted museums, an exploration of the perceived advantages gained from its use by museum professionals was also necessary. Overall, seven categories of advantages were identified based on the participants' replies, relating to engagement with collections, visitor attraction, accessibility, education, immersion, customized experiences, and technology reliability (see Figure 1). The first advantage identified by seven interviewees is the enhancement of visitors' engagement with the museum collection and the ability of VR to offer powerful experiences through immersive storytelling or to transport the visitors to inaccessible places or to particular points in time and history. This enhanced engagement seems to be more \"internal\" and emotional, moving away from a simple interpretation of a collection through text. As interviewee 16 put it:  
_\"If they can step into a virtual environment, there is another way of connecting through emotion, through being immersed in an artist's world. You can feel a connection that is more visceral, that you can't access necessarily or not everyone can access through reading a wall text\"._  
Figure 1: Reported advantages of virtual reality (VR) as perceived by the interviewees. This type of engagement can allow for the creation of playful interactions and memorable experiences that can be so intense that remain unforgettable for many years, or even engage people that initially may not be so interested in the museum. Quite characteristically, interviewee 15 described this effect that VR had on him as a child:  
_\"I can remember when I was young back in the '90s, I was seven. Me and my dad went to an aviation museum describing how the Americans parachuted out of the planes and fought the Germans in the Second World War. They had this harness where you would get into and they had the VR headset and you would jump with the soldiers out of the plane. This was one of the most intense and cool experiences I've ever had in a museum. And this was because of the VR and because I had this whole visualization of a story that was being told which didn't really have an impact on me until I used this VR headset. And it had a very lasting effect on me\"._  
Most interviewees agreed that VR can be an added value for museums to enrich their content and engage the audience in these stories in a powerful way. One of VR's undisputable advantages according to museum professionals (mentioned by 5 interviewees) is its power as a marketing tool to attract new visitors and engage younger audiences, who \"will stand in line for a long time to try it out\" (Interviewee 8). VR also has an effect on regular museum visitors, who \"changed how they saw us\" (Interviewee 3) and on the overall image and perception of the museum by its visitors, shifting the perceptions from old-fashioned to exciting: \"It shifted perspective on what a museum presents. It can be exciting and engaging, even for those who have low expectations of what a museum can offer\" (Interviewee 11). Accessibility was also emphasized as an important advantage by four interviewees, for different reasons. First, VR may offer advantages for people with disabilities by enabling them to access places that would otherwise be inaccessible. For example, in one case, VR was used to virtually access a ship (Interviewee 5). Second, although VR technology has been around for a long time, in many cases these museums offered the chance to their visitors to experience VR for the first time in their lives. As Interviewee 6 mentions:  
_\"I think the largest advantage of having VR in our museum is the exposure and opportunities our visitors get.