Notre Dame in Westminster
I was given a tour of this immersive exhibition from its creators Histovery.
This week I was happy to meet up in London with Raphaël Marchou, another ex-Sketchfab team member and now Director of Development at Histovery. Raphaël was kind enough to give me a guided tour of Notre Dame de Paris, The Augmented Exhibition at Westminster Abbey.
The exhibition, presented in Westminster Abbey’s 13th century Chapter House, tells the story of Notre Dame’s history, the destructive 2019 fire, and the ongoing restoration of the cathedral. The experience is comprised of a series of stations defined by large scale image prints, 3D printed scenes, and plinths with AR image targets on them. Duplicates of the exact same exhibition, all sponsored by L'Oréal, are currently staged in 4 other venues across the world, a neat affordance of this type of experience.
While I am generally sceptical of digital devices mediating experiences between a visitors and artefacts or artworks, it is entirely different when the entire exhibition is foundationally a digital experience, as is the case here. Each visitor is provided with a one of Histovery’s Histopads and can explore the aforementioned stations in any order, triggering content on their tablet by pointing its camera at each unique trigger image.
There’s an initial ‘training’ station at the beginning of the exhibition to help anyone new to the paradigm get the hang of using the tablets, but in general anyone familiar with an iOS or Android tablet will quickly understand how things work.
A Wealth of Content
The above video gives you just a small a glimpse of some of the pre-rendered 3D, 3D print, 360 imagery, interactive 3D, video, and annotated content delivered to visitors via the Histopad. There is so much more content to explore at the exhibition but I didn’t have much time to capture these clips.
Raphaël explained that for each exhibition that Histovery works on, the amount and type of content is carefully balanced for a great user experience. Where complex and deep topics are being presented, the content is optimised so as not to overwhelm audience members.
Alongside more serious educational content on the tablets are fun activities. Treasure hunts are very popular with younger audience members, encouraging thorough exploration of a venue or exhibition and digital rewards. Themed selfies provide content for audience members to share with friends and family, but are also a simple way for a venue to gather contact details for marketing purposes.
Anecdotally, the combination of technology and cultural heritage leads to some sweet intergenerational interactions: Raphaël describes times when he has watched younger people helping their older relatives learn to navigate the tablet and exhibitions and while at the same time the older generation is able to augment the digital experience with their own narration and knowledge.
Benefits of Digital First
Another great affordance of the digital first exhibition format is that the content can be periodically updated to include new research or to extend an experience with new things to discover. This is a great way for venues that have a more permanent or long term installation of the tablets to attract repeat visits from patrons.
Histovery seems to have hit on an experience sweet spot with their work, with venues employing Histopads reporting increased on-site visitor numbers. The tablets are not only attracting a larger audience but by adding Histopad stations to different locations (all of which can be viewed via an on-tablet map), organisations are able to encourage footfall to less frequented corners of their venues.
The digital nature of Histopad exhibitions also means that they can be packed up and licensed out by the original venue as a travelling exhibition. This can be a great way to increase the reach of the subject matter, but also the venue’s brand as well.
Finally, and while I can’t share any details, I was also given a glimpse of Histovery’s impressive analytics dashboard for the exhibition. All I will say is that I can imagine most exhibition organiser’s would give an arm and a leg for even a fraction of the granular, live data that Histovery is able to provide access to.
10/10, Would Go Again
I was lucky enough to visit this exhibition for free so take my opinion as you like but I was really impressed with what I was able to see and do at this exhibition. The quality of content is incredible, the user experience is simple and robust, and the many narratives of Notre Dame are deftly combined.
Notre Dame de Paris, The Augmented Exhibition runs at Westminster Abbey until 1st June 2024. At the time of writing, the exhibition is also running concurrently at other locations in France and Spain, see notredameexpo.com for more information.