One Partner for the Complete Digital Museum Journey

We should be plain about something institutions ask us directly. Fusion VR both advises and executes, and we will not pretend to a detachment we do not have. Where we are engaged as consultant, as project management consultant or as auditor, our recommendations on scope, specification and quality are made in the institution's interest alone, and every judgement we record is one we are prepared to defend to you in writing. Audit is the most clear-cut of the three, because the installation we assess was almost always built by another agency, and there is nothing of ours to protect in the finding. On government projects, procurement rules sometimes require the advisory and the execution roles to be held by different parties, and we follow them. Whether continuity or separation serves your project better is your decision, taken in the open. What you can rely on is that the advice never bends to win the work.

A word on the audit engagement, because institutions ask about it often. A digital museum draws on stereoscopic projection, spatial audio, motion engineering, software, show control, content production and interpretive design. Very few organisations, public or private, hold all of those disciplines in-house, which makes it genuinely difficult for an owner to verify independently whether what was installed matches what was specified. Most commonly we are appointed at project closure, when the officer or trustee responsible needs a competent technical record before signing off a substantial public or corporate investment, so that any question arising years later can be answered from documented expert assessment rather than recollection.

Our role there is verification, not fault-finding. We assess the installation against the contract, the specification and recognised technical practice, and we report what we measure. Where the work meets or exceeds what was promised, the report says so plainly, and that finding is as useful to the institution as any other. Where it falls short, we set out the gap, its practical consequence for the visitor or the operator, and what remediation would involve. We audit installations built by other agencies regularly, for government departments and private clients alike, and we approach every one on the assumption that the delivering agency did competent work until the evidence shows otherwise.

The engagements are not sequential and you are not committing to a path by starting with one. Institutions frequently begin with a feasibility study to establish whether a digital museum is worth pursuing at all, stop there, and return years later when funding is sanctioned. Others come to us with a completed concept from another consultant and ask us to execute it. Some appoint us as turnkey partner from the outset. Each is a complete engagement in its own right.

For government departments and public institutions, two practical points are usually relevant. We are a PWD licensed government contractor, qualified to execute works for public departments, and a substantial share of our delivered digital museums has been carried out through that route. We are ISO 9001 and ISO/IEC 27001 certified, with structured documentation and version control maintained on every engagement. That is the documentation trail an audit will eventually ask for.

We do our best work when the narrative, the space, the technology and the content are shaped together from the beginning. That creative and technical authority over the whole is what allows an experience to be more than the sum of its parts, and it is the model we recommend where an institution is free to choose. Where an architect is already appointed to the building, or a design consultant already engaged on the narrative, or an execution contractor already under contract, we work alongside them without difficulty. A digital museum is rarely the only workstream on a site, and the technology has to arrive into a building somebody else is putting up. In those cases, defining the interfaces early is usually more valuable than defining the scope: who specifies what, who approves what, and who is responsible where two disciplines meet.

The order matters more than it first appears. A feasibility study asks whether the digital museum should exist at all, and ends in a recommendation rather than a design. An initial project report gives an approved idea enough shape for in-principle approval: what it broadly is, how it divides into galleries, and roughly what it will cost. A master plan turns that approved concept into something spatial, fixing where each gallery sits, how a visitor moves between them, and what the building has to provide. A detailed project report then specifies and prices exactly what the plan contains, in the form an institution needs for sanction. Execution follows, and by that stage nothing significant is still being decided. Operation and maintenance then carries the digital museum through the years it was actually built for, which is where the investment either keeps returning or quietly stops working.

This is the documentation sequence a project passes through, which is distinct from the engagement stages described on our homepage. Those stages describe how we work alongside an institution. These six steps describe the documents a project produces on its way to approval, sanction, execution and long-term operation.

The initial project report does not have a page of its own. We describe it inside the detailed project report page, because both documents come from the same discipline and institutions almost always meet them together. If your sanctioning authority has asked for an initial project report rather than a full detailed project report, that section explains the difference and what each one is accepted for.

Not every project begins at step one. Some institutions arrive with a concept already approved internally and need it made spatial. Some hold a master plan prepared by another consultant and need it documented and priced. Some have sanction in hand and need only execution. We pick up the chain wherever it stands, and the first thing we do is establish honestly whether the earlier work still holds, because building on a weak assumption costs far more than testing it.

Steps can be combined, but they should not be skipped quietly. On smaller projects the feasibility study and the initial project report are often written as a single document, and on a single-gallery project the master plan may sit inside the detailed project report rather than preceding it. What causes damage is not combining steps. It is reaching execution without anyone having answered the question the missing step was there to answer. The storyline, the ceiling height, the power supply, the cooling and the long-term running cost are all inexpensive to settle on paper and expensive to correct once construction has begun.

The sixth step protects everything the first five paid for. A digital museum is not a building that can be left alone once it opens. Lamps and projectors age, spares run out, operators move on, and the wider technology environment moves with them. An audio-visual product line reaches the end of its support life or is discontinued, its replacement arrives with different capabilities, and the software driving the show needs an upgrade to work alongside it. When that happens the content is not remade. It is reformatted to suit the new environment, through technical adjustments such as a change of codec, resolution or output format, and what the visitor sees stays as it was designed. This matters because content is where the largest share of a digital museum budget goes, and it is an asset worth maintaining properly rather than replacing.

Four of our services do not have a place in this sequence. They run alongside it, and an institution can bring them in at any stage. Project management consultancy is for an institution whose digital museum is being built by another contractor, and who wants technical oversight on its own side of the table. Independent audit and validation is for an institution with a finished installation, which needs an expert record of what was actually delivered. Experience design and content, and technology and engineering, are the production and engineering work itself. Some institutions buy them as part of a turnkey contract, and others appoint us for that work alone.

Across the digital museums Fusion VR has delivered, for government departments, cultural bodies, religious trusts and corporates, the projects that ran cleanest were the ones where these questions were answered in order. Our earliest stereoscopic installations, delivered in 2010, still run daily, and they do so because operation and maintenance was planned into the project rather than arranged after something failed. If you are not certain which step your own project is at, that is a useful conversation in itself, and it usually takes twenty minutes.