either way because it’s not all about VR. Dave Lloyd says: “Virtual reality is very much about consumption,” explaining that using VR doesn’t require creative thinking. The audience doesn’t need to bring anything to the experience: “You come into the library, put a virtual reality headset on: here is the VR offer, these are the VR pieces, use them if you want to.” Because it doesn’t ask much of the viewer, it can be hard to identify the takeaways or benefits for a community. “So, it’s poten tially a very flat piece of process,” Dave says. “A library service should offer a bit more and when we first did Digital Spaces, I wrote that it needed to work on these levels: consume, create and library skills.” But he says that with VR it is not an easy process to get beyond consumption: “It’s very tricky with technology that people haven’t experienced previously. If you ask someone ‘what do you want to do with this?’, unless they have experienced some of those things, the answer is ‘I don’t know’.”
Library skills
Fiona says that delivering a VR experience in a public library should generate value beyond entertainment: “For the libraries, what is really transformative, is the other stuff: the community of practice – get ting those nine library services to work together.”
She believes the challenges that come with VR will demonstrate the value of cooperation. “It is really complicated and labour intensive for an individual library deciding to acquire VR headsets and license VR content for their communities. There are no comprehensive industry standards either for headsets or content management systems and individual experiences are generally optimised for one particular type of headset making them incompatible with others.” Like books, VR content involves intellec tual property, rights holders and agree ments but “VR is like that, times 20,” she says, and, unlike library books “there is no centralised distribution agency for the content so you will have to go to each individual producer of each piece of work and ask them how much money they’d like, and then they’re going to ask you how many headsets, how many sessions and what duration – so it’s complicated.”
One to 10
The centralised creation of the VR tour fixes that side of the VR content problem, allowing libraries to explore the other challenges – like whether they can cope with a VR piece at all. Dave Lloyd grades VR content from one to 10 in terms of difficulty hosting. He says most of the VR in Digital Spaces is level 3 or 4 and some pieces will be too much for public libraries like In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats (www.
youtube.com/watch?v=LdaqhL5-8U4) a piece created for Coventry City of Culture. It cost
32 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL Digital Spaces Tilt Brush. Photo © Hayley Salter
dance. In the time that four people could watch In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, 60 or 70 could watch our content.” The latest Digital Space programme will enable more: “In the first Digital Spaces we had bitesized pieces. It didn’t require hand controls. Someone sat on a chair. This new Digital Spaces is different, it is far more interactive with hand control lers. So librarians will work through their library spaces and their health and safety, risk assessments.”
Fiona Morris.
£500k to make and lasts 40 minutes. “You speak to the police who are chasing people. You travel in a car from location to location, experience the sound system, talk to the music producer, and then you’re in the rave with a lot of people dancing. The experience was incredible,” Dave says. “But it’s 40 minutes long and you need to be able to move around and
Tolerance
Another aspect is what people can cope with: “How long would you want to be in that immersive environment?” Fiona asks. “I think the headset closing you off com pletely will probably always be slightly lim ited to the gaming environment because you don’t really want to be shut off from your physical environment for too long.” To explore this, Digital Spaces includes working with Neon8 a company that specialises in 180 degree (as opposed to 360 degree) VR. “It is much simpler. It’s also more akin to what we’re used to. In the theatre you don’t strain over your shoulder to see what’s going on behind you. It also makes what you need in terms of cameras and editing much simpler. So, we’re running community workshops in each of the nine libraries where the servic es will identify a community group they want to work with on a local story.”
Skills Digital Spaces Exhibition. Photo © Hayley Salter
Investigating this tolerance issue has provided useful feedback which Dave said was put to good use very quickly by library staff: “I’ve watched so many of my staff being able to engage with people who are slightly reticent, the people at the back,
Spring 2025
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