GTS is a five-star rated attraction located in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders.
Featured as one of the key museums in the UK on BBC´s "the Museums that made us", GTS tells the story of Scotland using over 1000 tapestries stitched by over 1000 stitchers from all walks of life and all corners of Scotland. By length, it is larger than the famous Bayeux Tapestry in France. An attraction of this calibre entering the Metaverse requires careful consideration, planning and detail.
The success of this project led to The Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions (ASVA) and Traveltech for Scotland involving us in the development of "The Metaverse Playbook" for the tourism sector. This resource covers everything from explaining the technology, right through to what New Frontier and our clients have to achieve at each step of the development process.
Continue reading to discover how we met the remit of this special and significant museum.
New Frontier carefully took GTS through all of the steps for imagining, defining, creating, implementing & evaluating a Metaverse solution.
We settled on the idea of NFTs representing different themes from the Tapestry: Inventions, Battles, Kings and Queens & Traditions. Each theme lends itself to rich imagery, opportunities to explore stories and create and interactive solution for families and young people, the target demographics of this project.
The NFTs have been thoughtfully designed to add a new interpretation of the Tapestry that can be scaled at a later date. Within the Enjin network, we identified possible games to support a hidden scrolls treasure hunt. Some of these would be hidden in the local community and the rest within the game itself, creating a hybrid real word/digital experience for visitors.
The hidden scrolls treasure hunt will be coming in Phase Two of this project.
The Museum is in the heart of its community, so community had to be central to the solution. We developed educational resources for local schools and supported the regional authority (Scottish Borders Council) in the development of an App for all schools in the Scottish Borders, as well as for use with visiting school groups to the Museum itself.
We developed a competition for the community to add to the NFT collection by submitting designs for the vision of these themes throughout the rest of the 21st Century, to add to the new interpretive view of the past.