In real life, the Lewis chess pieces are only a few inches high, and you can look but never touch them. In extended reality (XR), however, two pieces can now be seen at larger than human size and then, with a few taps of a joystick, shrunk down and twirled around your hand.
Found in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, these ornate Medieval carvings in walrus tusk ivory are a highlight of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The warder biting down on his shield and the queen sitting on her throne are among the impressively high-fidelity, 3D digital models of museum objects that have been created for Museums in the Metaverse, an XR platform being developed by University of Glasgow researchers. Supported with £5.6m of “levelling up” funding from the UK government’s innovation agency, the platform will enable users to both view and curate hundreds of artefacts from participating collections.
A virtual Victorian museum
Ahead of the planned public launch in April 2025, The Art Newspaper took a virtual tour at the university’s Advanced Research Centre XR laboratory. Wearing a Meta Quest 3 headset and with a controller in each hand, this reporter is transported to an airy atrium with a chequered marble floor and a wide staircase flanked by gigantic replicas of the Lewis chess pieces. The fictional setting convincingly evokes a Victorian-era museum.
But here there are no vitrines. I practise “teleporting” around the space and summoning artefacts so they can be examined up close from every angle—revealing, for instance, the museum catalogue numbers on the base of the Lewis chess pieces. The eclectic array of objects to choose from includes a massive walrus skull hanging above the stairs and two enlarged beetle specimens on plinths around the virtual hall. The experience is genuinely immersive, down to the twinge of vertigo I feel after teleporting up a staircase to pick up a ceramic jug.
XR is “not a replacement for a physical museum” but it can offer “an entirely different experience with different benefits”, says the project’s Pauline Mackay, the head of Scottish literature at the university and an expert in Robert Burns. In 2021 she worked with the immersive learning company Edify to develop VR teaching tools around Burns’s poetry and the historic sites and objects associated with him. Even as the chair of Scotland’s national Burns collections, Mackay says she had never “encountered this material culture as intimately as I did in virtual reality”.
Edify is the technical partner charged with developing Museums in the Metaverse, while the first 300 digitised artefacts hosted on the platform are from National Museums Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland and the university’s Hunterian museum. Each 3D model is generated through photogrammetry—a technique that stitches together hundreds of images of an object captured by an automated rig—and then optimised by 3D artists.
The biggest challenge in creating an immersive virtual museum is the “visual fidelity” required to render historic objects in convincing 3D, says the project’s principal investigator, Neil McDonnell, a professor of philosophy and XR technology with a background in the 3D visualisation industry. “The high bar of quality makes it really hard.” At the same time, he says, “it’s easy to get to the benefits of VR” for the cultural heritage sector. The core user functions of Museums in the Metaverse—rotating an object, manipulating its scale and repositioning it in the virtual environment—can feel like “magical new powers” next to the real-world experience of visiting a museum, McDonnell says.
Users add their own narrative
From the top of the staircase back to earth: it comes as a slightly jarring transition when Mackay demonstrates how to call up the flat text panels that are available for each object. The platform will offer “essential information” about the artefacts from their home collections, she explains, but users of the forthcoming “creator mode” will have the option to add their own narrative for the objects they curate in their virtual museums.
This second side of the platform is now being prepared for the new year, McDonnell says. Creators will be able to search and select objects from a library, and access different types of virtual environment in which to curate them. Users can add not only text to their chosen objects but also images, web links, digital files and their own audio guide.
The researchers envisage the launch as a prototype that will evolve as more museums in the UK and beyond sign up and add objects to the platform. Many museums have already digitised their collections online—and some have dabbled in XR in partnership with tech companies. Museums in the Metaverse wants to be “a safe pair of hands” that serves the sector’s interests in democratising access, McDonnell says, without “making any intellectual property claims” on the 3D digital models, which will be retained by the participating institutions. “There’s no long-term commitment,” he says. “There’s no exclusivity.”
Apart from intellectual property concerns, the other major barrier for museums wanting to enter the metaverse has been the cost. The Meta Quest 3 currently retails at around £500. McDonnell believes that the headsets will break through to a mass market of at-home consumers in five to ten years, but in the meantime, the team hopes to offer access to the equipment through VR arcades and the participating museums.
How to make the platform financially sustainable is still an open question. Part of the university’s research involves negotiating a “commercialisation model” with the initial partner collections, McDonnell says. There could be a blend of free XR experiences and subscription-based premium content on the platform that will earn revenue for the participating museums.
For now, the focus is building the virtual worlds. “We’re bringing together the stories we’ve been researching, the environments that we’ve procured and the objects we’ve digitised to really show what the platform can do going forward,” he says.