However, museums have faced many difficulties in attracting visitors for a long time, especially after the period of the Covid-19 epidemic. Recently, many museums are finding new methods including digital transformation to draw people to museums.

Local museums are able to provide a sense of community and place by celebrating a collective heritage, contributing to the protection and promotion of the value of the cultural and historical heritage of the nation.

After a period of hiatus due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, museums in Ho Chi Minh City have reopened, but they reported a loss of roughly 30 percent- 50 percent of their annual visitors.

Therefore, museums are reinventing themselves to keep abreast with the times and stay relevant in a digital world to be more attractive to visitors, and one of them is the application of technology to introduction and display as an inevitable part of the digital transformation roadmap.

In fact, digital transformation does not have to wait until after the pandemic broke out but had started before. However, the impact of the epidemic with social distancing requirements has prompted many museums in Ho Chi Minh City to accelerate the introduction of exhibits that combine technology and build an online tour platform.

Typically, the Gallery of Engineering and Technology Applications at the Southern Women's Museum used a new hologram projection machine in the exhibition space.

The Southern Women's Museum is the first museum in Ho Chi Minh City to apply this technology device Images of artifacts and historical figures through a Hologram machine show 3D in combination with 3600 interactive software and virtual reality technology, helping visitors to feel artifacts like in real space with many different angles.

Meanwhile, the War Remnants Museum recreated five large prisons in South Vietnam during the anti-American resistance war in a simulated outdoor container.

The museum has not only used 3D technologies, but also incorporated light, temperature, and sound technologies to partially show the authenticity of the old prisons.

At the peak of the coronavirus epidemic on June 2021, the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of History piloted the project ‘3D/360 Intelligent Interactive Museum’ to serve visitors during the application of mandate social distancing. Most recently, this museum has also started testing the Sanbot Robot model using artificial intelligence (AI) to guide visitors, with initial features such as photo slide shows, and introductory videos. About museums, artifacts, and galleries.

At the Ho Chi Minh City Museum, the first digitization experiment is being carried out at the Nature - Archeology Gallery. Visitors will be equipped with virtual reality glasses for a more complete experience.

Images of terrain types in Ho Chi Minh City, areas with archaeological artifacts reproduced by virtual images and linked with on-site artifacts, are expected to make visitors feel more excited.

Doan Thi Trang, Deputy Director of Ho Chi Minh City Museum, said that the museums must take heeds of content combined with technology, offering programs suitable to the nature of the museum and attracting visitors.

Therefore, in each museum, in addition to applying technology, we try to ensure the quality of content specific to each unit.

As the Southern Women's Museum uses 3D images to recreate the beauty of women's costumes in the context of real life, not simply displaying costumes in glass cabinets while the War Remnants Museum uses a sound and light system to recreate the fierce atmosphere of the prison.

The seminar "Museum marketing communication: Strategies and methods in a contemporary context" was held in Ho Chi Minh City by the Museum of History in HCMC in collaboration with the Faculty of Cultural Heritage - Ho Chi Minh City University of Culture.

Seminar representatives from museums in HCMC and a number of other museums in the country all agreed that the use of technology and digital transformation in displaying artifacts is a significant factor to attract people to museums.

The application of technology and finding the right model for the museum's content is not a problem because technology will develop constantly and museums hardly develop.

Source: SGGP