There is something slightly odd about a museum spending millions to make you forget that you are in a museum.

Museums already possess things most entertainment businesses would kill for: dinosaur skeletons, ancient manuscripts, priceless paintings, spacecraft and objects that have survived for hundreds or thousands of years. Yet increasingly, those objects are being joined by projection, spatial audio, virtual reality, interactive systems and environments designed to make visitors feel as though they have walked somewhere else.

The Natural History Museum in London offers a good example. Its Our Story with David Attenborough experience used 360-degree projection, animation and documentary footage to turn the Jerwood Gallery into an immersive cinematic environment. More than 133,000 people experienced it during 2025, while the museum’s mixed-reality Visions of Nature attracted more than 52,000 visitors.

Those figures do not prove that immersive technology caused the Natural History Museum’s wider visitor success. The museum had 7.1 million visits in 2025, with its collections, galleries, gardens, exhibitions and other activities all contributing. They also show that immersive experiences have moved well beyond the experimental stage and become a measurable part of what major cultural institutions offer.

And now the money is getting serious.

The easy answer is that museums want more visitors. The more interesting answer is that the competition for visitors has changed.

A museum competes for the same Saturday afternoon as a concert, football match, cinema, restaurant, shopping centre, theme park, city break, or immersive entertainment experience. The visitor does not necessarily divide those choices into neat categories such as “culture” and “entertainment.” They simply have a limited amount of free time and a growing number of things to do with it.

That makes the experience itself increasingly important.

ExCeL London provides a useful comparison. Its Immerse LDN destination passed one million tickets sold in January 2025 after just over two years of operation. Jurassic World: The Exhibition alone sold 315,000 tickets and ran for 137 days, while ExCeL expected the destination to reach 2.5 million visitors annually.

What matters for museums is not that an entertainment venue has sold tickets. It is that museums are competing in a market where audiences already spend money on physical experiences whose main product is the experience of being somewhere.

That puts pressure on museums to make the physical visit offer something that cannot be replicated by a website, a video, or a virtual tour.

The clearest European example is currently taking shape in Ireland.

Galway City Museum is undergoing a €19.3 million redevelopment, with €12.6 million in capital funding from Fáilte Ireland. The project will add a three-storey extension, expand exhibition and education space and create new immersive exhibition areas designed to bring Galway’s history and culture to life.

The numbers attached to the project are revealing. Fáilte Ireland projects that the redevelopment will attract an additional 820,000 domestic and international visitors over 10 years and generate €47.3 million in additional direct visitor spending for the local and regional tourism economy.

The project is being treated as part of a visitor economy, not simply as an investment in collections and exhibition space. Construction began in September 2026, and the project is explicitly being presented as a way to strengthen Galway’s tourism offer, encourage longer visitor stays and increase spending in the surrounding economy.

That is a long way from the idea that the museum’s job ends at the entrance to the gallery.

The visitor experience has become an economic proposition.

This is where the easy version of the story falls apart.

It would be tempting to look at projection-heavy exhibitions and conclude that museums have discovered that visitors want bigger screens. That misses why the technology is useful.

Museums use immersive systems because they can solve problems that physical objects cannot solve easily. Technology can reconstruct places that no longer exist, visualise processes that cannot be observed directly, explain enormous scales of time or space, and allow visitors to experience environments that cannot physically be brought into a gallery.

The Future Box at Munich’s Deutsches Museum is a useful example. The museum describes it explicitly as an interactive experience rather than a conventional exhibition. Visitors explore emerging technologies including quantum computing, spacecraft and humanoid robots through interactive exhibits, guided by human Future Hosts and an AI system called AI-ME. The experience also includes virtual reality.

The important part is not that the museum has installed an AI guide or VR system. It is that the visitor is expected to participate.

The technology changes the relationship between the visitor and the subject.

There are also cases where the distinction between exhibition and attraction becomes harder to maintain.

Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum has opened its major Yayoi Kusama retrospective, covering more than 70 years of the artist’s work. One of its defining experiences is a newly created Infinity Mirror Room that visitors physically enter.

That is not a screen showing an artwork. It is a physical room of mirrors and light that the visitor steps into to  become part of the environment.

The exhibition is particularly useful to this discussion because Kusama’s work demonstrates that immersive environments, whether based on projection or physical objects, do not necessarily represent a retreat from serious museum practice. The exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, drawings, fashion, collages, happenings and installations. The immersive room sits within that larger curatorial story.

The lesson is not that museums have decided objects no longer matter. It is that the physical experience of encountering those objects, and of moving through the exhibition, is increasingly being designed as carefully as the collection itself.

The museum visit has become part of the product.

There is an obvious financial reason for that shift.

Museums across Europe are trying to attract audiences while dealing with funding pressures. In Britain, the current debate over charging international visitors for admission to national museums illustrates the wider problem: institutions need sustainable income, but charging for access can conflict with the public mission that makes museums valuable.

Experience-led programming offers another route.

A permanent collection can remain free while a special exhibition can be ticketed. A temporary immersive experience can create a reason to visit a museum again. A new visitor journey can generate additional spending through shops, cafés, memberships and events.

That does not mean every immersive installation exists to increase ticket revenue. Museums have educational, cultural and research responsibilities that cannot be reduced to a commercial calculation.

But the economics help explain why the experience has become strategically important. If the museum is competing with every other way a person can spend two hours, it needs to give them a reason to make the journey.

The museum is selling the visit as well as the collection.

Museums depend heavily on authenticity. Their authority comes partly from the fact that the things on display are real, original and culturally significant. Immersive entertainment works differently. It is often deliberately constructed to manipulate perception and create an illusion.

Those two approaches can sit together extremely well. A digital reconstruction of an ancient city can help visitors understand the world in which an artefact was created. A virtual environment can explain an archaeological site that no longer exists. Spatial audio can recreate an environment that disappeared centuries ago.

But there is a point at which the visitor may remember the experience more vividly than the object.

That is not necessarily a failure. It may be precisely what the museum wants. But it changes the institution’s job.

Once the experience itself becomes a reason to visit, the technical system creating it is no longer simply supporting the exhibition. It is part of the exhibition.

This is where the story becomes directly relevant to the AV industry.

A conventional museum installation might use lighting and audio to help visitors understand an object. An experience-led installation can depend on projection, LED, spatial audio, tracking, sensors, playback, and networking and control systems to create the visitor experience itself.

That changes the engineering brief.

Brightness is no longer simply about whether an image looks good. It determines whether an illusion survives across a large surface and through changing ambient conditions. Audio is not merely reinforcement for a film or spoken explanation; it becomes part of the physical geography of the experience.

Networking can be carrying synchronised content and control information rather than office traffic. Tracking has to remain accurate while hundreds of people move through a space. Playback systems have to recover gracefully. Control systems have to be understandable to the people who operate the museum rather than only to the engineers who commissioned them.

AVIXA’s recent coverage of immersive AV makes the same operational point: the difficult part of immersive technology is not opening night. It is keeping the experience working once it becomes a daily attraction.

The operational shift is visible at Munich’s Deutsches Museum, too. The museum’s own staffing requirements for Future Box include media control, equipment maintenance and technical support. Once AV becomes the experience, someone has to operate it every day.

An immersive exhibition can look extraordinary in a launch video and still become a nightmare for the people operating it every day.

Museums create unusually demanding technical environments. Visitors touch things. Children lean on things. Thousands of people move through the same spaces. Exhibitions can run for months or years. Equipment often has to be hidden because the technology is supposed to disappear into the experience.

That creates an awkward contradiction. The more invisible the technology needs to be, the more carefully it has to be engineered.

A visitor should not know that a projector has failed, a tracking system has lost calibration, playback has stopped or a network path has gone down. They should simply believe they have walked into another world.

That is a much more demanding brief than “install a big screen”.

An immersive exhibition increasingly has many of the characteristics of live production. There is a visitor journey, programmed cues, content playback, lighting states, audio environments, control systems, audience management and an operating team responsible for keeping everything working.

The technology has become part of the choreography.

That also changes who needs to be involved. AV integrators, content producers, exhibition designers, lighting specialists, network engineers and museum teams need to work together much earlier because the boundaries between content, space and technology are disappearing.

A museum may once have asked an AV supplier to provide the equipment required to support an exhibition. Increasingly, the supplier is helping create the environment that the visitor has actually come to experience.

That means the integrator’s job starts to look less like equipment supply and more like experience infrastructure: designing for throughput, operating hours, maintenance, recovery and accessibility while preserving the illusion that the visitor is simply somewhere else.

Museums are not abandoning objects for screens. They are recognising that the object alone is no longer the whole visitor proposition.

The most interesting projects use technology to solve a real interpretive problem or create an experience that physical collections cannot provide on their own. Galway’s €19 million redevelopment shows how seriously some cultural institutions now take that visitor proposition; the Natural History Museum’s attendance figures show that audiences will turn up for it; and exhibitions such as Kusama’s demonstrate how completely the visitor can become part of the work.

For AV professionals, the consequence is straightforward: stop treating the technology as the supporting act.

If projection, audio, tracking, networking, lighting or control are responsible for what the visitor has paid to experience, they are part of the exhibit. That means designing for throughput, operating hours, maintenance, recovery, accessibility and long-term reliability from the start.

The museum’s question is no longer simply, “What equipment do we need?” It is, “What experience are we promising, and can this system deliver it thousands of times without breaking the illusion?”

That is a very different AV brief.

And it is why the next generation of museum technology may be less about putting screens around objects and more about engineering the experience that surrounds them.