Making sense(s) in virtual environments: Multisensory and embodied museum experiences

In museums today, screen-based interactions with curated content are increasingly part of the rich semiotic environments that mediate visitors’ meaning making. One result of this development is the introduction into gallery spaces of new modalities that engage multiple senses and invite new types of movement, gesture, discourse, and social interaction. How may studies of interactions in new museum ‘mediascapes’ contribute to multisensory and embodied perspectives on meaning making? In this talk, I reflect on how this question has been addressed through our research in the past decade, focusing on a recent design-based study of an immersive exhibition in a national architecture museum. This study explored how senses may be enhanced in virtual environments to “make sense” of architecture. The exhibition experiment was the outcome of an interdisciplinary university–museum research collaboration, involving partners with similar interests in how VR technologies may foster real multisensory, visuospatial experiences of architecture in a museum setting.