How polyvocality can enhance Virtual Reality exhibitions for cultural heritage

What is it about?

Large parts of museum collections, particularly in the Netherlands, are a legacy of the colonial past, guiding people's societal perceptions of cultures and histories. There have been increasing efforts to ensure that museums acknowledge and reveal to visitors the multiple (e.g., cultural) meanings and contexts attached to objects in these collections. We address this as an effort to increase polyvocality.

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Photo by Sara Kurig on Unsplash

Photo by Sara Kurig on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The work contributes to the effort to emphasize, but objectively acknowledge, multiple (perhaps conflicting) perspectives attached to cultural resources. We provide a measurement to assess polyvocality amongst individuals and a case study including an adaptive, polyvocal exhibition design. The developed Virtual Reality (VR) exhibition curates the flag of Suriname (1975—today), in which participants interactively encountered multiple perspectives on the flag's colors and, in three different sceneries, learned how those relate to Suriname's history. In sum, the present approach explicates the polyvocality construct, proposes ways of assessing a polyvocal mindset, and recommends design principles to tailor polyvocality-enhancing VR applications.