Alliance for Immersion in Museums Evaluation Memo

In Fall 2023, the Museum of Science, Boston (MOS) received a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) titled AIM: Alliance for Immersion in Museums. This project built the foundation for a coalition of museums and media producers from across the United States, all working together to address current topics of relevance to our communities via immersive digital experiences in museum settings. In the proposed project, a nascent group of coalition members shared best practices, developed standards, identified effective interaction modalities for experiences, and documented strategies for sharing media and content between museums; all in the interest of making immersive digital experiences of the highest quality more widely available in museums across the United States.

This memo shares the findings from the evaluations conducted as a part of the AIM project. There were two main evaluations: (1) A professional evaluation sought to understand the current state of the museum field in terms of developing digital immersive exhibit spaces as well as the design principles that museum professionals think are most important to include in these spaces; and (2) A public evaluation where MOS visitors were asked to use two digitally immersive exhibit spaces and report on what made the spaces immersive, interactive, and accessible.