Visitors to the British Museum are invited to walk into a 4,000-year-old roundhouse this weekend, where the fire is lit, the floor swept and some enigmatic objects lie waiting to be discovered.

The museum is launching its first virtual reality weekend, inviting visitors to engage with the past not just through the real objects in the galleries but through state of the art 3D headsets, tablets, and a projection of the recreated house into a dome structure large enough for groups of five to enter.

Digital recreations of three bronze age objects – one so recently discovered that the gold is still caked with mud – have been placed virtually within their original context, but there will also be gallery talks by the curator, Neil Wilkin, to encourage visitors to move from the recreated past to the real objects.

Mysteries surround the objects, which Wilkin argues could all have been found in a house of the period, sparking storytelling and reminiscence by the fireside.

The magnificent bronze Beaune Dirk is a princely dagger, but could not have been intended for practical use: the blade was never sharpened, nor the end drilled to attach a wooden hilt. The little gold entwined hoops, found at Woolaston in Gloucestershire, which the museum hopes to acquire, have been seen by some scholars as hair ornaments – but they were deliberately cut down after they were made, and Wilkin believes this can only have been so they could be worn by a child.

The third object is an unexciting looking twist of bronze, but the most enigmatic. More than 50 of the so-called Sussex loops have been found – but all within 18 miles of Brighton, and nowhere else in Europe. They were believed to be bracelets, until a French postgraduate student looked closely at one and said she thought it would be too uncomfortable to wear. Wilkin now believes they may be cloak fasteners, and visitors will be invited to try a replica and give their own opinions.

A Samsung Gear VR headset (left) and a tablet (right) can be used to navigate through the virtual reality roundhouse. Photograph: PA

The weekend is the institution’s first experiment in bringing the virtual reality and digital interpretation work up into the main museum, which has been going on since 2009 in the Samsung Digital Discovery Centre in the basement of the Great Court. More than 60,000 young people have visited it there. More senior museum staffers admitted to finding the VR headsets discombobulating – a common unease was looking down at an apparently real floor but not seeing one’s own feet – but the younger visitors embrace it without hesitation.

“The technology is particularly useful for the bronze age, a difficult period for visitors to engage with and imagine museum objects in their original context,” Wilkin said. “The bronze age people are very annoying to archaeologists, they tended to scour the sites bare and burn their houses to the ground when they abandoned them, and bury their objects in pits up to a mile away.”



The virtual reality roundhouse, with the fire flickering and crackling and changing levels of light shining through the open door, has been created by Soluis Heritage. Martin McDonnell, chief executive of the company, said the billions being invested in gaming technology had the side effect of making it far more available for heritage use, with cardboard headsets into which a cheap smartphone could be slotted already a reality: “We’re seeing the rapid democratisation of what had been very exclusive technology,” he said.

The 3D scans of the objects were created through the museum’s pioneering Micropasts project, where thousands of people across the world accepted the invitation to help online to transcribe information and model museum objects.

Some of Wilkin’s colleagues have queried how neat and smart the hut looks, fit for a glamping holiday rent. “I think that’s based on a common misconception that everyone in the past was filthy dirty,” he said. “There’s no reason to think people would have liked to live among heaps of rubbish 4000 years ago any more than we do.”

The Virtual Reality Weekend at the British Museum, London takes place from 8 to 9 August. Admission is free.