Creating Waves in Immersive Tech: Meet Amy Shakespeare
By: Kaitlin Fritz
Tags: AR, Cornwall, Museums, Innovation, VR

She leads innovation across the museum sector with her work at Cornwall Museums Partnership and the Immersive Museum Network. From the wAVEs projects connecting England to Sicily to promoting accessibility and diversity through the latest AR, VR, and XR technologies, Amy Shakespeare Innovation Manager at Cornwall Museum Partnerships shares with us her thoughts on integrating new ways of working within the arts and inspiring others with the limitlessness of technology.

Amy, looking back, you have had a professional route that has been woven with innovation and visitor experiences. Can you share a bit about your path into the cultural sector and your current role as Cornwall Museums Partnership’s Innovation Manager?

I completed a degree in History at the University of Exeter, at the Cornwall Campus. I was drawn to the course there as it had modules in Public History — something that wasn’t available elsewhere until postgraduate level. During this time I completed a placement at the National Trust and volunteered at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. However, when I graduated I decided to go into recruitment consulting. After five miserable months, I quit with nothing lined up — realizing that as nice as it was, money wasn’t my main driver.

Following this, I got a job with the National Trust at Godolphin as Visitor Services Officer, managing the house and collections, marketing, and events. After 11 months I secured a promotion to Senior Visitor Experience Officer managing three sites across the Tin Coast and the visitor experience for West Cornwall countryside. During this role, I started my MA in Heritage and Interpretation with the University of Leicester.

Then, I decided it was time for a change as I wanted to progress my career, and I happened to attend one of Cornwall Museums Partnership’s events where I learnt about their goal to create positive social change with museums. I knew it was something I was keen to be involved with.

I applied to be their first Marketing and Impact Officer, but a few months later was project managing the Cornwall Heritage Awards, and then got the job managing the wAVE Project. During this project (which seeks to create immersive experiences in five museums in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly), we realised that there were lots of research and development opportunities for the charity — specifically around innovating with new and emerging technologies. New projects and collaborations were rapidly coming on-board, so we restructured to create a new Innovation Team, which made me the new Innovation Manager in early 2020.

I describe my specialism as being interpretation in all its forms, so I am particularly interested in how we can innovate to create better and more accessible, decolonised, and inclusive interpretation utilising the potential that immersive technology offers.

During my time at CMP I have completed my MA, winning the Professor Susan Pearce Prize for my dissertation ‘What If We Want To Give It Back? The Potential of Democratising The Repatriation Process in Britain’, and have now started a PhD with the University of Exeter.

Can you share more about Cornwall Museums Partnership and its mission?

Cornwall Museums Partnership is an independent charitable incorporated organisation, formed in 2015 to provide leadership for Cornwall’s museums; to support them, represent them and give them a voice. Our purpose is to create positive social change with museums. We do this through four areas of work:

Commissioning programmes

Brokering partnerships

Delivering training and skills development

Research and development

Also, what exciting projects that have been happening or are in the pipeline?

We’ve got the wAVE immersive experiences launching at museums across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in May which is really exciting — two VR, one AR, and two apps.

Through wAVE we’ve developed MuseumLens™ with local tech company Pansensic which is a new way of conducting evaluation through chatbots and data scraping of social media and review sites.

I’ve also been managing a project funded by the Museums Association Esmee Fairbairn Fund and The Space, to enable audiences to explore under-utilised audio archives through voice user interfaces in partnership with tech company Hi9. There are 216 variations of experience that users can access through their smart speakers or smart phones and we’ve been working with Plymouth University’s EPIC Health programme to work with care homes in Cornwall who have smart speakers and can use the experience for reminiscence work with residents.

I also founded the Museums Immersive Network which seeks to further establish the use of immersive technology in the sector through webinars and podcasts. This is a truly international network with over 300 members based all over the world.

We have a few exciting projects in the pipeline and I can’t say too much at this stage what they are, but they build on wAVE and our other projects. We are looking to investigate two main strands of immersive technology; the ability to make our museums more accessible in all senses of the word, and supporting museums with practical tools to decolonise.

wAVE Project

Now, wAVE is an amazing project that brings together heritage, academics, and the latest technology. Can you share more about the premise of wAVE, what is stands for, and the impact you have made so far?

The wAVE (AVE = Augmented and Virtual Experiences) Immersive Experiences in Museums Project is funded by the Coastal Communities Fund. The project brings together Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly’s coastal communities, heritage centres and academic experts to develop new and engaging virtual, augmented and immersive reality experiences within the five participating communities of Bude, Looe, St Agnes, Porthcurno and the Isles of Scilly.

wAVE was developed by Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership, Cornwall Museums Partnership, and Falmouth University. It aims to use Cornwall’s distinctive heritage to support digital innovation and economic diversification in five coastal communities by maximising Cornwall’s digital infrastructure, skills, and heritage for the benefit of the local economy.

The county’s distinct history coupled with its growing immersive-tech sector, presented a unique opportunity to position Cornwall at the forefront of the transformative potential of such technology.

wAVE follows three strands:

Digital Revival — Innovative technologies developed with Falmouth University’s research experts — such as VR headsets, HD projection, CGI and more — allows visitors to explore heritage sites, see artefacts in their original settings and meet historical figures in new immersive visitor experiences.

Human-Centred Design — Working with staff, volunteers, and communities to ensure that the experiences meet the needs of their future users.

Impact and Legacy — wAVE will raise the profile of Cornwall’s unique culture and heritage offer. Local communities have been involved in a programme of digital training to allow wider tourism businesses to harness the opportunity presented by immersive technology. Allowing local people to add value to their businesses through future-proofing their offer by differentiating their product, becoming more visible and accessing new virtual experiences to entice new visitors.

You can read about the impact of the project so far by viewing the project’s impact report here.

So, what was the reasoning behind implementing immersive technologies for this project? And what unique benefits do these mediums offer?

The heritage of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly is extraordinarily rich but is at times under-promoted and inaccessible. wAVE seeks to redress this by bringing together technologists, research experts, creative industries and local community networks to take visitors on an interactive and immersive journey into the past, presenting new opportunities for year-round international and domestic tourism.

In 2018, the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership published its ’10 Opportunities Strategy’ which set out its priority areas for investment. Their number one priority is the creative industries due to Cornwall’s artistic heritage and a rapidly growing digital sector. Falmouth University is one of the leading creative industries-focused universities in the country. The wAVE project aims to harness these assets, to inspire innovation and raise the region’s profile on a national stage. The two-year project runs until July 2021.

The Local Enterprise Partnership identified Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality, alongside cultural tourism as the key distinctive strength for Cornwall. wAVE’s ambition to create new and innovative visitor experiences helps to deliver the LEP’s strategic vision.

This project also allows us to capitalize on Cornwall’s £132 million investment in superfast broadband to enhance the visitor offer or drive footfall in the shoulder season, appeal to younger audiences and emerging international tourism markets. There is a large opportunity for the museums — there are 25.8 million visitors available to the five museums and the current penetration rate is just under 0.5%.

Cornwall’s distinct maritime history, coupled with its growing immersive-tech sector, leading technical and research expertise at Falmouth University presented a unique opportunity to position Cornwall at the forefront of the transformative potential of such technology

The augmented and mixed reality experiences have been co-developed with the five participating communities to interpret the areas’ diverse cultural heritage in new ways. The aim is to provide enjoyable, contemporary and inclusive virtual experiences which will strengthen the local economies.

This means the experiences are not only very different to each other but also deeply connected with the museums, their collections, and the local area.

What advice would you give to other museums and institutions looking at exploring immersive technology?

It’s a pretty common piece of advice — but don’t start with the technology, start with your collections and your stories. Think about what you want to achieve, utilize a user-centred design process, and if a form of immersive technology is still your conclusion then go for it and ask lots of questions!

Now, you not only have these awe-inspiring projects, but you are also creating waves in educating and sharing best practice with the Museum Immersive Network. Would you mind sharing more about this organization?

The Museums Immersive Network came out of a number of discussions and roundtables I was invited to around immersive technology and museums. I realised that there wasn’t one place where all of these conversations could be captured, and yet it was an emerging part of practice that people were keen to learn more about.

Once I had the idea, I got into conversation with Nicola Henderson from XpoNorth and we decided to partner on the network — to demonstrate leadership from the edge with two rural areas at the forefront in this field.

The network has been established to promote and share best practice, new developments, skills development opportunities, and potential collaborations with immersive technology and museums. We believe that immersive technology offers the potential to interpret our collections and share our stories in new, accessible, and interesting ways.

Museums Immersive Network

What is your vision for Museums Immersive Network?

I hope that the Museums Immersive Network will support the establishment of immersive technology more broadly within the sector and boost confidence in working with tech businesses to create new experiences for our communities, as well as innovating and improving practice in other areas of the sector. I think there is a lot of basic digital skills training for museum teams but there are those who are itching to try new things and move onto the next level. There are also those who want to work with tech companies and universities on these types of projects but are not sure where to start, or lack confidence when it comes to agile working and technical jargon. I hope that the network provides some of this training and CPD to boost confidence and enable collaborations which improve the way we work.

How can partners get involved?

We have a bi-annual webinar which runs roughly at the start and middle of each year and focuses on a specific theme — for example January’s webinar was on immersive tech in museums in a post-COVID world. We also have a podcast ‘Immersively, Museums’ which is about to start up again — you can listen to this wherever you usually get your podcasts, but we are also always on the lookout for guests who want to be on the show. We tackle common questions around immersive tech in museums such as ‘Does immersive tech really attract new audiences?’ and ‘How much longevity do immersive tech installations actually have?’.

You can sign up to the Museums Immersive Network mailing list to get all the latest updates here, or watch the previous MIN webinars on the CMP YouTube channel here.

What are you looking forward to at the Culture Reimagined Summit?

I’m really looking forward to the hands-on workshops on museum storytelling, audience mapping, and innovation from other cultural experts and of course any chance to network with other cultural innovators!