Photo courtesy The Valentine
My resemblance to “Star Trek: The Next Generation” character Geordi La Forge came to me after The Valentine’s Christina K. Vida, the museum’s Elise H. Wright Curator of General Collections, fitted the band-like goggles on me.
Jessica Delbridge, the adult programs and tours manager, compared the flip-down attachment to Duckie’s sunglasses in “Pretty in Pink.” The comparison seemed apt but surprising; then I saw crowds circulating around the Stonewall Jackson monument, from 1919, swimming out of the misty past. The Valentine garden didn’t fade away, but similar to a mirror reflecting into a mirror, I viewed a glimpse of history while rooted in the present. Which lately, hereabouts, has experienced plenty that's memorable, though perhaps not fully understood.
And that’s why we’re here.
The author in AR glasses at The Valentine (Photo by Harry Kollatz Jr.)
These “augmented reality” glasses are the fundamental part of the museum's “Monument Avenue: Origins and Reverberations” walking tours, beginning at 10 a.m. on Saturday, July 24, and Saturday, July 31; these first two tours have already sold out, but additional upcoming offerings will be listed on The Valentine's calendar.
The tours were created in partnership with the Richmond-based ARtGlass.
In my time I’ve led a few tours, which means I’ve relied purely on my ability to create word pictures and sensations or, if pressed, passed out photocopied handouts. I’ve also taken tours where the guide used a binder with photographs to explain What Was Here and held it in front of What’s Here Now or, even more fancy, an electronic tablet that displayed similar kinds of views. What’s brewing with The Valentine and ARtGlass isn’t meant to dissuade discussion or the potential for “A-ha!” moments, but, as Delbridge says, “This continues in The Valentine’s tradition of challenging conversations.”
Projected into the lenses are the events of the Monument Avenue timeline, from the first designs to the events of summer 2020. Through a transponder worn by the visitor, audio and visual pieces are broadcast to complement the real-world views.
The trained Valentine guides, however, aren’t of the “Now, on your left,” variety. Delbridge explains that the tour groups, usually about nine people, are asked a question such as, “When you were in school, what was the Civil War called?” Answers include “The War Between the States” and so on, and an explanation showing how those phrases entered the lexicon occurs though the headset.
“Why we at The Valentine were so impressed by this,” Vida explains, “whether it’s the consistent content of audio or video, there’s also a huge dialogue component encouraging interactions, to have these discussions of where you’re from, how did you learn about this in school, how did you learn about this when it happened?”
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Participants in a Valentine augmented-reality tour (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
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The AR tours were created in partnership with Richmond-based ARtGlass. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
ARtGlass gave the tour a trial run last fall. The research came in large part from the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. “These free tours with actual history,” recalls Richmonder Lexi Cleveland, a project director for the company, who developed the tour content and led them herself. “The success was pretty unexpected. The whole point is to get people to see things.” Though not always through a lens, but in their mind’s eye.
“Last summer I’d be walking [by a] coffee shop and hearing people talking about the monuments,” Cleveland says, “but there wasn’t any context.”
Content and context is what ARtGlass strives to provide, whether at James Monroe’s Highland estate, George Washington’s Mount Vernon or even exhibits at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. But they’ve also deployed, as they say in their biz, these tours for some 43 museums and historic sites worldwide, including little places like the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
Whether seeing is believing can be deduced from post-tour evaluations.
The Valentine plans to field eight of these tours for about nine people each during the coming season and gradually expand. Other compact, history-rich environments locally include Capitol Square and Shockoe Slip.
Cleveland enthuses, “I would love to do Shockoe Slip,” sounding like a Richmond lifer, which she is. “It’s one of the things I’ve wanted to do for ages.”
In addition, the program will be offered for free to Richmond Public Schools and Title I students, through the support of the Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond, the Jackson Foundation, the Moses D. Nunnally Jr. Charitable Trust, the REB Foundation, the Shelton Hardaway Short Jr. Trust, VCU Health and Wells Fargo.
I don’t know if I’ll ever not want to follow a visor-capped veteran guide who explains by gesturing with their hands or evoking quotes from those who participated in what happened on a particular site on a particular day. Sometimes a certain quality of light or the fall of shadow across a late summer’s afternoon provides its own perspective. If, however, the events of the past 14 months or so have taught us anything, it’s that we’re in a phase of both new and renewed understandings.
And we need all the help we can get.
