Virtual museum and heritage tours: reaching visitors who cannot come

A virtual museum is a second entrance, not a substitute

Museums in Jordan and Saudi Arabia share a problem: the people who would benefit most from the collection are often the ones least able to reach it. A school in a distant governorate, a student abroad, a researcher who needs to see an object before travelling, a visitor who cannot manage the stairs. A physical visit remains the best experience. A tour makes the collection available to everyone else, and makes the visit more likely for those who might otherwise not plan one.

That is how we think about a virtual tour for museums Jordan teams commission. It is not a digital copy that competes with the building. It is an addition to the museum's services, with an audience, an owner and a reason to be updated. The heritage programmes that disappoint are usually those built as a showcase for launch day, then left without a budget, a curator or a process for adding the next gallery.

We build tours as part of our virtual tours service, and the heritage programme we describe on our heritage metaverse page applies the same discipline at national scale.

Rooms and objects are captured differently

A gallery is a place: it is captured from fixed points as a 360 tour, with hotspots placed on the objects that matter. An artefact is a thing: it is captured by 3D scanning, which produces a model the viewer can turn, zoom and examine. The two are planned differently, and confusing them is the commonest source of a weak brief.

Both are planned around the conservator, not the camera. Light levels, handling restrictions, time windows and security determine how long the team can work and what equipment it can use. Fragile or light-sensitive pieces may be scanned in short sessions or modelled from reference photographs instead. We agree those rules before any equipment arrives, and they are written into the schedule.

Our studio scans physical objects into 3D and animates them for tours, holograms and learning content, which we describe on the 3D content studio page. The same scan that appears in an online tour can be rotated at life size on a hologram display in the gallery.

Museum hologram Jordan: what holograms add, and what they do not

In May 2023 we installed a hologram and projection route in a national military memorial in Jordan: rear-projection hologram screens, a filmed virtual speaker welcoming visitors, floor projection and renewed dome projectors. It ran on site in roughly three weeks and connects ten displays to a cloud dashboard that museum staff operate themselves. The case study gives the full account.

A museum hologram Jordan visitors see inside the building is a projection system: a dark screen, a projector behind it and a film written to be watched on it. It adds presence, a figure standing where the story happened, but it needs controlled light and a real script. Holograms are best for the two or three moments that deserve a figure, not for every label. Our post on projection mapping for museums explains which projector goes where.

A virtual tourism experience for Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is building a tourism sector at speed, and heritage is central to it. A virtual tourism experience Saudi Arabia visitors can try before they book combines three things: immersive tours of heritage and landmark sites, hologram guides at visitor centres and fairs, and on-demand films that work as previews.

Our 2024 proposals for this market include a programme of immersive 3D on-demand recordings of twenty tourism locations, and hologram tour guides, AI avatars that answer visitors' questions in their own language. These are proposed programmes built on delivered Nplay products rather than completed national projects, and we describe them as such on our destination tourism page. The value for a museum or heritage site is the same in either country: the people who see a good preview are more likely to visit.

Accuracy is a workflow, not a promise

Heritage content carries a particular responsibility. A wrong date, a mislabelled object or a careless reconstruction damages trust in the institution. So we treat accuracy as a process with named owners: the museum's historians review the script and storyboard before 3D production begins, approve the final cut, and sign off each update afterwards.

That is how the memorial project ran, with story drafts reviewed and approved by the client before any modelling. It is also why we recommend a named owner inside the museum for the tour, a simple update calendar, and Arabic and English content written together rather than translated later. Tours built this way stay credible, and staff can add a gallery without calling us.