“The Story of the Cleveland Krishna” HoloLens Experience Full Walk-Through

This video provides a full, first-person point-of-view (POV) walk-through of the HoloLens experience, “The Story of the Cleveland Krishna.” This HoloLens experience was one part of the exhibition Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain, on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from November 14, 2021, to January 30, 2022. This POV walk-through was filmed in the exhibition gallery during the run of the show. However, the 2-D format does not allow for the immersive experience that 360-degree spatial sound and visuals provide when viewed through the HoloLens. Visuals and audio in this video may not appear exactly as they do in a mixed-reality setting. 

The exhibition presented the story, context, and new restoration of a masterwork in the museum’s collection. Featuring an immersive, mixed-reality HoloLens tour, the exhibition transported visitors to the dramatic floodplains of southern Cambodia and told the life story of the CMA’s monumental sculpture Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan, spanning 1,500 years and three continents, and unveiled the newly restored Krishna alongside related sculptures in an integration of art, technology, and experiential design. 

In the third gallery of the exhibition, visitors were introduced to the world of Phnom Da and immersed in the global story of Cleveland’s Krishna through a mixed-reality experience. The voice of Krishna guided visitors through an augmented-reality landscape that blends photorealistic virtual 3-D models of locations and sculptures with ethereal motifs from the Krishna myth. This tour was guided through each visitor’s Microsoft HoloLens 2 headset, providing surround sound and situating the virtual experience as if users were in the physical environment itself. Visitors followed the journey of Krishna from Cambodia to Europe and Cleveland, concluding with its digital restoration and reinstatement in the original cave temple on Phnom Da. Through participating in the experience, visitors could understand all the factors across time and place that impacted the way Krishna looks today before traveling to the next gallery to see the sculpture itself, on display for the first time since its recent reconstruction. Groups of six visitors began the 11-minute HoloLens tour every two minutes, moving through six stations around the gallery, allowing for up to 36 simultaneous participants. This was the first time that a HoloLens 2 experience “on rails” had been attempted in a museum context. This would not have been possible without the generous support and expertise of Microsoft and the brilliant work of our partners at the Interactive Commons at Case Western Reserve University, whose tireless work on development over the past two years brought the story of the Cleveland Krishna to life. 

This experience was developed in collaboration with the mixed-reality development partner the Interactive Commons (opens in a new tab) at Case Western Reserve University. The HoloLens experience was also developed with the collaboration and support of Microsoft, the official technology partner of Revealing Krishna.