"The Story of the Cleveland Krishna" HoloLens Experience Full Walkthrough

This video provides a full, first-person POV walkthrough 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 11/14/2021 - 1/30/2022. This POV walkthrough was filmed in the exhibition gallery during the run of the show. However, the 2D format does not allow for the immersive experience that 360 spatial sound and visuals provide when viewed through the HoloLens. Visuals and audio in this video may not appear exactly as they do in mixed-reality. 

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 transports visitors to the dramatic floodplains of southern Cambodia and tells 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 guides 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 is guided through each visitor’s Microsoft HoloLens 2 headset, providing surround sound and situating the virtual experience as if users are in the physical environment itself. Visitors follow 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 can 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 begin the 11-minute HoloLens tour every two minutes, moving through six stations around the gallery, allowing for up to 36 simultaneous participants. This is the first time that a HoloLens 2 experience “on rails” has been attempted in a museum context. This would not be 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 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.