Mariemont AR

The Royal Estate and Museum of Mariemont in Belgium is the museum institution of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, is located in Wallonia and houses, among other things, the second largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in Belgium.

As part of its digital transition, the Museum is trialling a new digital journey in its permanent collections.

"The Gates of the Past: Objects Reveal Their History" downloads to a smartphone via a QR code at the entrance to the museum. Then begins a fun and interactive digital journey of about 45 minutes in total, in three sections of the Museum, Egypt, Greece and Asia.

Visitors are invited to locate five thumbnails to scan in each section. The activated sticker generates a general knowledge or observation question in the windows on his phone. The visitor's journey progresses as thumbnails are activated and responses are encoded
(correct or not), up to the thumbnail of a sixth object whose scan activates an animation. Via image, background sound, and voice under a sound shower and on a wall screen, in a 3-minute sequence, the object is told to the visitor, in the first person. It recounts in an accessible and humorous way its former functions, its manufacture and the craft techniques used, the meaning of its patterns, colors or attributes, its owners, its value in their eyes, and its incredible journey to the museum.

The visitor lives the same experience in the three sections, with a series of different objects and learning. He thus discovers the respective tribulations of a wine jar of a Chinese emperor, of a small statuette called Venus of Courtrai, and of four Egyptian canopies with viscera and he acquires on the way general knowledge on the arts of the table in Imperial China, attributes of Greek and Roman goddesses and Egyptian funerary rituals.
This application is currently at the prototype stage, intended to assess the attraction of new audiences - young audiences and audiences of the Mariemont park area - via digital technology, as well as user satisfaction with this mediation and proposed storytelling mode.
This prototype and its application were created by the Belgian firm Hovertone, in collaboration with the teams of the Domaine and Royal Museum of Mariemont, within the framework of the financing by the European Union of the Horizon 2020 project for research and innovation DOORS, Digital Incubator for Museums (grant agreement no. 101036071) of which the Estate and Royal Museum of Mariemont is a beneficiary.