In surveying the challenges facing practitioners of virtual heritage 2010s and 2020s, scholars have identified a struggle to create immersive virtual humanities experiences beyond photorealistic recreations of architecture. Recent work by Ben-Kiang Tan, Hafizur Rahaman, Jeremy Huggett, Elaine A. Sullivan, Lisa M. Snyder and Selma Rizvic have offered some ideas on ways of circumventing these issues. Their critiques of audience access and engagement can be broadly categorized as ‘narrative’ issues.

“It seems that content without relating directly to how a viewer perceives the virtual world does not create any meaning. Rather it works as a storehouse of visually presented objects,” Tan and Rahaman, assessing the situation in 2009, observed. “As a result viewers thus fail to understand the inherit significance of heritage which is not always immediately or visually apparent from a virtual heritage site.” There have been noble efforts to recreate architecture and objects in digital form, but the authors argue that many of these representations lack features that allow users to construct their own interpretation of what they are digitally experiencing. Tan and Rahaman call for developers of virtual heritage products to consider users’ demographic and cultural backgrounds by making the narratives of these products more open-ended.

While Tan and Rahaman posit that worlds with malleable narratives can better engage audiences, Rizvic describes the production of a suite of virtual content – a documentary, ‘serious game’ interactive digital model, and interactive digital story – that compliments each other and helps guide users through the process of knowledge acquisition. This structured package of content provides multiple entrance points for users at varying interest levels and encourages them to keep exploring the history of the site through a variety of media. 

“I would suggest that we are more often than not still at the stage of generating ingenious, largely passive imagery designed to be viewed and consumed – and this is equally as true of current consumer virtual reality headsets as it is of more traditional 3D heritage representations,” Huggett wrote. Practitioners of virtual humanities are facing the same issues as commercial video game developers.

Because user demographics, motivations, behaviors, and cultural backgrounds vary so greatly, it is difficult for virtual heritage practitioners to develop a one-size-fits-all methodology or framework to approach this work. Virtual heritage practitioners must engage with professionals and scholars in the disciplines of communications, marketing, and commercial video game development to develop more actionable practices to build, engage and retain audiences. Marketers, for example, use something called the Digital Marketing Funnel to map out users’ experiences in their digital properties. A version adapted for use in virtual heritage would have tremendous utility. As virtual heritage practitioners continue to experiment with various technologies and modes of packaging content, it is imperative that data is collected so that researchers have non-theoretical information on how users engage with these products.