Experienced through Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 headset, Museum of Austerity combines verbal testimony, original music, and volumetric capture to preserve memories of public and private events from the austerity era.

The Austerity Era refers to a decade-long campaign of government budget-cutting that began in the UK in 2010, following the global financial crisis of 2008. The government programme included reductions in spending on welfare, the police, road maintenance, and prisons, among others.

All Seeing Eye have worked with Trial and Error Studio on the concept of Museum of Austerity since it’s inception, as part of Digital Catapults’ CreativeXR programme and subsequently for it’s debut at LFF in 2021, and straight after at IDFA where it was the recipient of the DocLab Immersive Non-Fiction prize.

The experience is designed for up to 12 audience members wearing HoloLens 2 Headsets to be able to enter the museum and walk around freely. All Seeing Eye worked with Gareth Fry to develop the spatialised and responsive testimonial audio system which plays based on each audience members position and POV in relation to the holograms, triggering up close, and trailing off when moved and looked away from. Building the experience on the HoloLens 2 also brought unique rendering and lighting challenges in order to enable the lifelike reporoduction of each of the photogrammetry captured holograms, and retain the integrity of the people they depicted, not to mention the tracking of a large space containing so many people. All Seeing Eye worked with Microsofts World Locking Tools, adapting them to enable the experience to be straight forward to setup for touring managers and ensuring a stable, consistent and robust experience that has seen it travel to numerous locations on tour without issue.

As with all our experiences, Showrunner is essential in managing up to 12 active and 3 spare concurrent HoloLens 2 Headsets in this unique Mixed Reality exhibition, which merges a physical museum setting with virtual memorials.

To operate, show managers have individual control over selective filtering of content for trigger warnings, access features such as volume, caption & audio description, the ability to remove layers of audio, and real-time headset management and monitoring.

Find out more about Museum of Austerity at www.trialanderror.studio/museum-of-austerity