The use of vr technology to enhance museum visits: A case study for Taxila Museum in Pakistan

Virtual reality is a technology that enables a person to interact with a simulated environment and is surrounded by the virtual world. Such environment consists of the computer hardware and software. VR contains three dimensional videos and images that a user explores and considers itself as he or she is existing in a real and simulated world. Virtual reality technology is overwhelmingly advanced and becoming more frequent in its popularity throughout the world. Thus, the VR technologies have also taken place in the museum sector. There are many museums who are using VR technology to show their heritage and collections worldwide. Now the access to the knowledge and arts have become very easy and accessible to the viewers. Virtual Reality technology provides a number of advantages to the museums, like to overcome the lack of space or the visitor's interaction with the exhibits. VR allows the users to become more active in virtual experience of artistic simulations. This research is conducted in order to explore the identity and heritage of the Buddhist culture of the Taxila museum in Pakistan through Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Taxila has a very rich history of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is also very prominent in preserving its culture and heritage. This research demonstrates how much VR technology can be beneficial for visitors especially youth to actively visit the Taxila museum. This thesis aims to discover the observations of the Taxila Museum of Buddhism to enhance the visit of the youth to the Taxila museum through Virtual Reality (VR) technology to preserve its heritage and to make the content of the information easily accessible to the public in an attractive way. This research thesis analyzes the data and discovers the existing examples for the use of VR in culture preservation. The adoption of VR technology also provides an engaging attitude towards museums that is memorized by the people in a better way. This study contributes to developing the feeling of trust and confidence of people that have an emotional and imaginative experience. Whereas the methodology part outlined as interviews were conducted with tourists and visitors age group around 18-40 years, by giving them knowledge of virtual reality technology. The ultimate aim of having interviews is the evaluation and examination of using VR technology in the museums and to provide suggestions and ideas to design and develop advance VR technologies in the future. The participants were overwhelmed by the idea of using VR technology in the Taxila museum and gave positive feedback.