Neil McDonnell, as principal investigator, and colleagues secure a multi-million pound grant for their two-year Museums in the Metaverse project. Ths grant is from the UK government under the new "levelling up" Innovation Accelerator scheme.

The Museums in the Metaverse project will create a ground-breaking two-sided Extended Reality (XR) Culture and Heritage platform. It will empower online visitors to explore vast cultural assets in engaging new ways; enable novice and expert curators to create new content; and explore models of use to support sustainable economic and cultural growth. The project will harness the University of Glasgow's global reputation for research in digital cultural heritage and XR, together with key cultural heritage and immersive technology partners, to develop an innovative solution to constraints that can limit physical exhibitions to less than 10% of the objects held in collections, and limit audience reach by cost, distance, and accessibility. One side of the proposed platform is for visitors who gain access to a rich array of museums, sites, objects, and novel and dynamic experiences. The other is for virtual curators, where experts and novices alike can build enriching and entertaining narratives using objects and virtual environments that have never before been placed together in the real world.


First published: 29 March 2023