Michael Dixon: Technology can bring the magic of museums to all

Wednesday evening saw the premiere of David Attenborough’s Natural History Museum Alive 3D, the latest example of Sir David’s compelling story-telling. In the film, Attenborough meets characters from the Natural History Museum usually only known by their skeleton or fossilised remains. The dodo and the diplodocus, the sabre tooth cat and the ichthyosaur — each comes alive through scientifically accurate 3D.

Sir David has always innovated throughout his long career and this film for Sky has been no different. State-of-the-art CGI, 3D technology, science and research combine in a ground-breaking way to bring the museum’s now long-extinct inhabitants to life.

The visual effects specialists at Colossus productions worked very closely with our scientists to devise a plausible recreation of each animal. For the scientists, it was an interesting and surprisingly difficult task. Accustomed to working with them as fossils, it was an intellectual leap to imagine them in detail as living and breathing creatures. Responding to the questions from the 3D production team meant working out how these animals might have moved, sounded and behaved to a level they had not necessarily considered before.

Collaborations with broadcasters to create a film like this are a very good way of getting people interested in science. If they stay interested, that builds our collective ability to navigate and interpret the many problems that we face as a planet, such as climate change, natural disasters, new diseases and food shortages. And if a few viewers are inspired to study science, it may help to create the next generation of scientists.

Seeing our specimens being interpreted as they are in the film reinforces my belief that we need to continually seek new ways to use and adapt museum collections to make them exciting for new generations. For hundreds of years the national collections in London have inspired creativity and contributed to new knowledge, underpinning this city’s international status as a cultural, economic and political powerhouse.

Yet even with more than five million people coming to the Natural History Museum annually, visitors represent a tiny proportion of the possible audience. New advances in digital technologies open up museums, so what we hold can become more accessible. This is a time of extraordinary opportunity, promising a way to revolutionise the interpretation of our collections in exhibitions as well as inspiring new approaches to answering big scientific questions.

For scientific collections, increased access brings international democratisation, expanding the workshop of scientific research from the corridors of South Kensington to the labs and offices of researchers on every continent.

The world’s great museums are already actively working to digitise their collections. The Smithsonian Institution recently announced an impressive multi-million dollar commitment to it. And the French government has funded the Paris Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle to digitise its herbarium. Such comprehensive approaches promise that many thousands of physical loans can be replaced with an instant flow of shared information. Digitisation also opens up scientific information to a technologically literate, smartphone-wielding public, offering the potential for crowd-sourced science. This democratisation of science can really increase the rate at which we fully understand the world.

Meanwhile, museum galleries have already seen great steps forward. Multimedia guides can complement exhibition displays with insights from curators and show items not on view. The Churchill War Rooms lifeline table shows how digital interactives can give dynamic, multi-layered experiences. Even before our newly launched Sky project, a partnership with the BBC introduced augmented reality into the Natural History Museum in our award-winning Who do You Think You Really Are? film. These pioneering approaches reframe how people experience collections.

We are not the only ones experimenting. Google has opened its doors on its project to take big museums online with Google Open Gallery, allowing artists, gallery owners and anyone with cultural content to create a digital museum. From Pinterest to Tumblr, the idea of curating and sharing has become second nature online, though museums are yet to fully explore what this could mean for our collections.