Integration of 360-degree photography and virtual reality into museum storage facility design and education

The use of digital tools in architecture and design education has been experimented with since the 1990s. The representation and communication of architectural narratives have been facing an unprecedented challenge in education, research, and practice during the past couple of years. This study investigates if using 360-degree photography/video and virtual reality (VR) technologies can be beneficial in architectural education. It focuses on museums and their storage facility areas and buildings, and looks at how digital technologies can raise awareness of these spaces and improve future museum designs. Starting from the fact that museums usually lack a proper storage area due to wrong designs, this project has investigated how the subject of museums is treated in design courses and, how VR representation could help students visualise and immersively navigate an area usually not known to many: the storage facility.
The digital representation of real objects and the environment using 360-degree photography/video and VR technologies were tested on international architecture students in The Netherlands and Germany. The research methods combined qualitative and quantitative approaches (e.g., interaction, surveys, interviews, and visual/narrative devices) related to museums and cyber-ethnography. The results demonstrate how the digital tools positively affected students’ consciousness of museums and architectural qualities and how they inspired students to explore the area further. Students became more engaged and motivated throughout the workshops; they were able to learn from and compare different resources, providing valuable quanti-qualitative results. This paper will describe how 360-degree photography and VR visualisation were integrated into the existing teaching approaches.