Colosseum Lives debuts at the AAM Expo 2015 in Atlanta
Virtual reality technology designed specifically for museums was unveiled at the American Alliance of Museums convention in Atlanta. This was a big deal for us – it was the first time showing off Colosseum Lives anywhere. It was a fun three-day peek inside the museum industry, where we got to chat with museum professionals about the place VR had in the future of museums. And conversely it was also the first time most museum professionals came face-to-face with a VR product targeted for their industry.
Some museums were actively looking for interactive products for their institutions, while others had little idea about recent developments in virtual reality. That’s not really surprising for a field that’s less than two years old and has so far had a relatively low public profile. But we think that’s about to change, and soon.
We also ran into people who knew about the Oculus Rift and were clearly excited by the potential there. Because VR is such a new technology, we fielded a lot of questions about how it could fit into existing museums setups.
We noticed that the VR headset itself piqued the curiosity of passers-by; people would stop and look. Having a TV that displayed what the person wearing the headset was seeing really helped too, which gave us the idea to integrate a monitor right into our kiosk design.