Future Museum of Digitized Heritage
Over the last decade, many organizations and institutions have conducted highly detailed 3D digital preservation of cultural heritage sites around the world. The not-for-profit research center, Global Digital Heritage (whose archive is used for this current project), has scanned over 800 sites and museums; the research alliance Openheritage 3D publicly hosts the datasets of lidar and photogrammetry from hundreds of sites around the world, and the United Nations Geospatial Network is actively establishing standards and practices for capturing and sharing geospatial digitization in every country. In 2025, as a result of significant advances in scanning technology and efficiencies, the size and scope of the archive of 3D scanned heritage sites is astonishing. But the development of techniques and technologies through which general audiences can experience this great archive has lagged behind the archive’s quick growth.
The Future Museum Studio at Shanghai Jiao Tong University will soon be publishing the Future Museum of Digitized Heritage in the Vision Pro and Quest 3 marketplaces. This free app currently shares a small collection of scanned heritage sites in Spain which can be toured and learned about through the mixed reality experience. But the goal of the Future Museum app and platform is to provide experiences of hundreds of sites from the extensive archive of digitized heritage. We are developing an AI audio guide and efficient workflow, such that sites can be quickly catalogued with topographical metatags, and custom AI chatbots can be trained with relevant scholarly research, so that users can ask the museum questions about the site while touring it. By using custom trained AI, instead of pre-recorded audio narrations, the experience becomes less linear, and the production cycle less onerous, allowing for the publication of many more sites, and a broader range of audience experiences of the sites. As well, specialized scholarly research on heritage sites’ histories and architectures can be made available without the difficult editorial decisions concerning target audiences and accessibility. In the future, we plan to slowly expand the possibilities of how scholarly context can be shared; for example, the possibilities of visualizations, historical photos, diagrammatic explanations, and inscription translations are quite intriguing.
A 4-minute demo video (really just edited video feed from the Vision Pro) is available at this link:
https://youtu.be/mlMJrfNCcgw
Geoffrey Alan Rhodes is a tenured professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry. He is the director of the Future Museum Media Innovation Studio, a center for research in augmented and virtual reality as it connects to new museums and immersive experiences in traditional museums. Previously, he led the development of new media design curriculum at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s department of Visual Communication Design, and new media at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Film and Animation. Rhodes’ films and media art seek profound combinations of virtual and real. His project, Chicago00, is an award-winning partnership with the Chicago History Museum to produce virtual reality experiences of photographic history.
