Designed in the early 18th century by Sir James Thornhill, the Painted Hall, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, features more than 3,700 square metres of Baroque walls and ceilings. These surfaces are covered in striking images depicting 200 figures including kings, queens and mythological creatures.
As part of their award-winning conservation and restoration project, The Old Royal Naval College (ORNC) invited ATS to help them bring James Thornhill’s epic painting closer to the viewers at home. As part of a dual project alongside creating the new on-site multimedia guide, an online solution would increase online engagement and on-site ticket sales.
Challenge
ORNC wanted to extend the exposure generated by the once in a generation restoration project to reach new online audiences. ORNC appointed ATS to explore three main challenges:
The project was commissioned prior to the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, which meant the timely launch of the website in April 2020 coincided with addressing the significant issue of how to engage with audiences when they are closed to the public.
The approach to designing a digital experience, as with any interpretive content or visitor experience, is that it has to have a purpose – simply putting 360 images of a space or building with no content or interpretation won’t provide impact or retain visitor interest, the solution had to include a variety of high quality bite-sized content that is easy to use and share.
As a capital project funded, in part by National Lottery Heritage Fund, it needed to be easily maintained and financially sustainable. From the outset we knew the solution had to be easy to access across all types of devices including smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. Developing a native app (an app downloaded from app stores) was disregarded early on due to cost barriers (of initial design / build, testing and ongoing hosting and updates required), plus from a user experience the added task for the visitor to download the app wasn’t desirable. ORNC were also having a new website built, therefore it was decided a micro-site integrated into the main website would be the best tool for the job.
As with a physical tour, we explored and tested the user experience, designing the interface, wayfinding and routing of a digital tour. We had to overcome the challenge of exploring both the ‘physical’ space and include detailed interpretation of the complex painted scenes of gods, monarchs, seafaring and complex allegory. Visitors must not get lost or they will leave the website prematurely.
The 360° explorable virtual tour of the Painted Hall allows visitors to view the paintings in ultra-high resolution detail, either following a suggested tour route or through a self-led journey of the Hall revealing the symbolism that is featured in the painted scheme.
Accessibility has been a high priority for ORNC throughout the whole restoration and reinterpretation project, the virtual tour includes audio description & narration, text transcripts and British Sign Language videos for deaf and hard of hearing visitors.
To create as much of an entertaining visit to the website as possible we developed a range of creative content including:
You can view the virtual tour here.
