# Virtual Reality in Museums: Exploring the Experiences of Museum Professionals
## VR Uses and Museum Professionals' Perceptions
### Uses of VR  
In most cases, VR was introduced in the participating museums for the first time in the last 8 or 9 years, with the vast majority being introduced especially after 2015. VR is used by most participants (9 museums) more sporadically in the context of temporary exhibitions, although there are 6 participating museums that incorporated this technology on a permanent basis. Interestingly,in two cases, the success of the temporary exhibition using VR was such that it invoked the museum to keep it permanently. As further discussed in Sections 4.2 and 5.2, the temporary use of VR can be associated with both a lack of solid strategic framework for introducing such technologies but most importantly with the financial and staffing constrains that VR creates, characterized by participants as \"labor intensive and very costly\" (Interviewee 16). In most cases (7 museums), VR was used to allow the visitor to experience a space that is no longer accessible or to time travel. In art museums, this is usually a place depicted in a painting or even the actual studio in which an artist worked to get a sense of his/her ordinary life. VR was also used to immerse the visitor in history and places that cannot be currently experienced. In one example, VR was used to allow visitors to \"experience the life on a train car in World War I\" (Interviewee 3). Apart from facilitating immersion and education inside the museum, VR was also used as a vehicle for further community engagement, since the aforementioned museum partnered up with high school students to develop the storyline. The use of VR for engaging schoolchildren was evident in another participating museum where a 3D model of the museum was available for schoolchildren to use at school through VR headsets (Interviewee 15). In another example, VR was used to allow the visitor to \"time travel\" and experience a particular event in history, having a painting depicting a historical event as a starting point. Here the aim is to experience the depicted historical event and to give visitors the \"feeling of walking into history\" (Interviewee 4). This category of uses also includes the use of VR to allow visitors to experience places that cannot be accessed easily (such as the bottom of the ocean or Antarctica) and to deepen their understanding on topics relating to climate change, wildlife etc. This is frequently encountered in science and natural history museums, in which we may also encounter a multi-user VR experience, in the form of VR theatre shows. In one case, in order to increase realism, the museum enriched the space in which the VR was offered with real physical components that were also depicted in the VR. As Interviewee 14 explains: \"We built these physical walls or baskets that were also represented in the virtual space so that the visitor had that direct visual connection between what they saw in the physical world before they put on the headset\". VR is also used as a tool through which paintings become \"alive\", allowing the visitor to enter the painting and the world created by the artist (encountered in 3 art museums). This use provides the visitor with an intensified aesthetic experience and enhances art appreciation. Two museums also hosted VR artworks on a temporary basis, shown with the use of head mounted displays (HMDs) in an installation environment. Having said that, artworks that use VR technologies differ dramatically from VR applications created for the purposes of explaining, educating, and interpreting collections or concepts. In two other cases, the use of VR is strongly connected to the educational aspect of the museum visit. For example, museum 7 offers VR guided tours led by a scientific explainer: \"Depending on the type of tour, you are free to explore the virtual environment and to follow the storyline otherwise the explainer guides you during the exploration commenting what you are watching in real time\" (Interviewee 7).