Guests attending Burns Night suppers this month can get unexpected help in appreciating Scotland’s national bard – thanks to virtual reality. The Art of the Burns Supper has been created by Glasgow University researchers and takes participants on virtual trips that reveal the stories behind his poems and songs and his love of whisky – and haggis.
The VR experiences have been created by scanning items from Burns collections across Scotland as well as key sites and places in his life. The result is an eclectic vision of the poet whose birthday is celebrated by Scots across the world on 25 January.
Crucially the lessons learned in developing the project are now contributing to an even more ambitious venture: Museums in the Metaverse. The £5.6m project has been set up by the university to create virtual reality guides that will allow individuals to open their own VR museums and allow visitors to enjoy collections assembled from across the globe.
“More than 90% of objects in collections cannot be seen by the public because they are in storage, while most of those that are actually on display are kept inside glass where they cannot be closely examined,” said the project leader, Professor Neil McDonnell. “Museums in the Metaverse will help liberate these collections.”
An example of the issues facing the project was provided by those encountered in setting up the Robert Burns VR experience, said Dr Pauline Mackay, another key member of the Metaverse team. “There is a lot of Burns memorabilia in Scotland but it is scattered in different places round the country,” said Mackay, who is also director of Glasgow University’s centre for Robert Burns studies.
As examples, she pointed to Burns’s first editions and relics displayed at his birthplace museum in Ayr; the mausoleum built for him at St Michael’s Church in Dumfries; Alloway Auld Kirk, the setting for his great supernatural poem, Tam o’Shanter; and a cast of his skull – made by a phrenology enthusiast after Burns’s body had been exhumed in 1834 – kept at Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum.
“You cannot expect people to move all over Scotland to view these items if you are trying to appreciate his poems or songs,” Mackay said. “And even if you get to a museum where they have some key Burns objects, you cannot pick them up and view them closely. However, you can get around all those problems in virtual reality.”
The team’s VR experiences include a striking sequence that allows participants to follow in Tam o’Shanter’s footsteps on his visit to Alloway Auld Kirk, scene of his encounter with Auld Nick and his coven of witches. “Importantly, we see the church as it would have been in Burns’s day – before its rafters fell down,” said Mackay.
In addition, people can peruse 3D images of a surprising array of items that reveal Burns’s popularity as a cultural icon over the past two centuries. These range from an egg timer featuring an image of his birthplace, made by W & A Smith of Mauchline who cornered the market in 19th-century souvenir woodwork, to a Coca-Cola bottle, produced in a limited edition in 2009 to mark the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth. “Burns was the first person ever to feature on a commemorative Coca-Cola bottle – which is a testament to the global reach and significance of his literary and cultural legacy,” added Mackay.
But putting these items on VR was not easy. In the past, items often had to be brought to sites where there was specialist equipment in order to be scanned – using a process known as photogrammetry – so that full 3D images could be taken. A key development has been the creation of scanners that can be taken to institutions where images can be created without major disruption.
“These are the kind of issues that we need to address to create virtual reality museums as part of our metaverse project and certainly the lessons we have learned with our Robert Burns project have been crucial,” added McDonnell. “The potential of Virtual Reality Museums is extraordinary. They will allow us to host collections of any size, show distant objects side-by-side, and be accessed from anywhere in the world. But there are several challenges – economic, technological, and cultural – which have to be overcome and that is what we are doing now.”
This point was backed by Mackay. “The possibilities of the Museums in the Metaverse project are vast,” she told the Observer. “There is no story, there is no collection that you could not access or use on the platform and that is what we are homing in on now. What has been done for Burns could soon be done for thousands of others.”
