The New Interactive: Reimagining Visual Collections as Immersive Environments

Emerging technologies and shared standards have opened up new avenues for the curation and presentation of data in archives and published research. Among their many benefits, these developments have made collections across archives more accessible, and have vastly improved the visual experience for users. This paper focuses on the next step in applying technical development and standards to digital collections: improving discoverability and providing a visual product that is simultaneously informative and experiential. The cases presented here focus on new approaches in these areas, with an emphasis on the utilization of visual search and discovery across a research archive and the integration of data and image into an augmented reality (AR) experience, with discussion of how these approaches can improve the usability of visual material while broadening the user's experience from the purely visual into the realm of the immersive.