Pioneers in XR: How Immersive Heritage Technology Is Reshaping Heritage

For much of the last century, our relationship with heritage has been shaped by limitation. Access depended on proximity. Interpretation relied on institutions. Understanding the past often required physical presence, specialist knowledge, or formal permission.

“The value isn’t the scan itself. It’s what access allows people to do with it.”

— Dr John Piprani, University of Manchester

Immersive technologies are beginning to change that relationship. Tools such as XR, spatial capture, and AI are not simply adding new layers to heritage interpretation. They are altering how stories are discovered, shared, and experienced, particularly at the scale of landscape, memory, and lived experience.

This article reflects on those shifts through practice, conversation, and collaboration. Drawing on insights from researchers, technologists, and heritage practitioners, it explores how immersive approaches are reshaping access, participation, and responsibility in digital heritage.

From Representing Heritage to Engaging with Place

Early digital heritage work often focused on representation. Sites were reconstructed, objects visualised, and collections digitised. These efforts were valuable, but they frequently mirrored existing hierarchies, presenting history as something to be observed rather than entered into.

Immersive technologies offer a different possibility. Instead of standing outside history, audiences can begin to move within it, navigating space, scale, and context in ways that feel embodied rather than instructional.

This shift reframes heritage not as a static record, but as a living relationship between people, place, and time.

“XR becomes powerful when it’s used to support participation, not just presentation.”

— Caroline White, Immersive Media City / DARKFIELD

Access Is More Than Technology

Accessibility is often framed as a technical problem: platforms, devices, or interfaces. In heritage, access is also cultural, social, and geographic.

Immersive tools can remove physical barriers, enabling people to explore sites they may never visit. But without care, they can also reinforce exclusions, privileging those with technical confidence or institutional support.

Meaningful digital heritage work therefore requires more than tools. It requires participation. Co-creation. A willingness to treat communities not as audiences, but as contributors and custodians of their own stories.

“Participation isn’t a feature. It’s a design responsibility.”

— Dr Juan Hiriart Vera, University of Salford

Ethics, Care, and Responsibility

With new capabilities come new responsibilities. Immersive technologies can make heritage more vivid and engaging, but they can also oversimplify, aestheticise, or decontextualise complex histories.

Ethical immersive practice asks difficult but necessary questions. Who controls the narrative? Who benefits from digitisation? What is lost as well as gained?

In heritage contexts, technology should not overwrite meaning. It should support care, accuracy, and respect for the people and histories being represented.

Keith Myers reflects on immersive technology as a tool for care, responsibility, and connection in heritage practice.

Seeing the Landscape Differently

Some of the most profound impacts of immersive technologies emerge at the scale of landscape. Tools such as drone capture, photogrammetry, and LiDAR reveal patterns that are invisible from the ground.

Ancient alignments, routeways, and subtle earthworks begin to appear not as isolated features, but as connected systems shaped over long periods of time.

These tools do not replace archaeological interpretation. Instead, they invite collaboration, combining human expertise with computational insight to ask better questions about the past.

AI and landscape-scale analysis are revealing patterns that were always present, but never visible.

These conversations sit within a wider reflection I have been developing around heritage, technology, and place.

Read the full long form article: Heritage, Technology, and Place.

Immersive Heritage Technology in Service of Story

Immersive technologies are most effective when they serve narrative rather than spectacle. Whether through XR experiences, spatial storytelling, or digital mapping, technology can act as a bridge between research and public understanding.

The challenge is not innovation for its own sake, but intention. Choosing the right medium for the story being told, and knowing when not to use technology at all.

What Immersive Heritage Makes Possible

When used thoughtfully, immersive tools can expand who gets to participate in heritage, how stories are shared, and which histories are surfaced. They offer ways to reconnect people with place, memory, and meaning.

They also encourage collaboration across disciplines, bringing together archaeologists, technologists, artists, educators, and communities.

Why This Moment Matters

We are at a point where the tools are powerful, accessible, and increasingly commonplace. The question is no longer whether immersive technology can be used in heritage, but how and why.

The choices made now will shape how future generations encounter the past.

Looking Ahead

Immersive heritage is not about replacing traditional practice. It is about extending it. Done well, it can deepen understanding, widen participation, and foster care for places and histories that might otherwise be overlooked.

The real opportunity lies not in the technology itself, but in how we choose to use it.