By Roberta Gilchrist
A new Augmented Reality app at Glastonbury Abbey (Somerset, UK) balances sacred heritage and gamification to encourage visitors to explore the abbey ruins and learn more about its past. Location-based gameplay was chosen especially to engage families with younger children (aged 9 to 14) and to share research on the archaeological collections of Glastonbury Abbey Museum in an innovative way. The storytelling narrative engages directly with the sacred heritage of Glastonbury Abbey and aims to respect the beliefs of diverse spiritual stakeholders who venerate the site today. It draws on Glastonbury’s rich medieval tradition of pilgrimage and its spiritual quality as a ‘thin place’.
The narrator is a medieval female pilgrim, who explains that the boundaries between spiritual and earthly worlds have worn thin at Glastonbury Abbey, causing time to become potentially ‘dangerous’, and resulting in objects from the past slipping through to the present.
Visitors are invited to help by returning objects to the past, to the medieval people who have lost them. They navigate to ‘rifts’ where they solve a simple puzzle to cause an artefact to fall through, most of which are only partial fragments, reflecting their actual state as recovered by archaeological excavations. The artefacts range from a mundane cooking pot to religious objects such as an ampulla for storing holy water and a tiny reliquary that would have held a fragment of bone or textile associated with a saint.
The app user needs to identify which artefact they have found, from a menu of 12 potential objects in the app’s pilgrim satchel. A clue is given in an excerpt of dialogue, revealing hidden voices and human stories from the past, featuring monks, pilgrims, servants and an almswoman. Once the artefact is successfully identified and returned, the user is rewarded by seeing the object in its original condition.
Through the power of AR, it transforms from a fragmentary archaeological artefact into a pristine object. For example, a tiny fragment of blue glass turns into a scene from a Romanesque stained glass window. The user can examine the 3D object in detail before storing it in their pilgrim’s satchel. At four key locations, the rift opens up a 360 VR scene of a building as it would have appeared in the later middle ages. This gives a sense of the scale and grandeur of medieval Glastonbury and how the past can be reconstructed from archaeological research.
The app is a collaboration between Roberta Gilchrist (Department of Archaeology, University of Reading), Glastonbury Abbey, Arcade immersive heritage and Thread architects, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and based on research undertaken on the archaeological archives.
Religion & Collections 