The first scenario we envisioned addresses the challenges faced by museums in organising fashion exhibitions that involve loans from other institutions. To avoid the many complexities related to loans (fragility of historical objects, high costs of transportation and couriering, as well as issues related to prolonged display and conservation), the pilot experimented with new techniques of displaying using Social Virtual Reality. The aim is to curate an exhibition showcasing 3D costumes from fashion collections belonging to different cultural institutions. Building upon the successful MediaScape project by the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision (NISV is Europe's leading media museum and an EFHA member), this scenario will combine the digital and physical experience with 3D objects coming from various collections in a virtual immersive environment, and it will make them available in the Data Space for Cultural Heritage.

In June 2024, 5Dculture presented the ‘Fashion Beneath the Skin’ exhibition, with digitized garments from the archives of the Centraal Museum Utrecht (CMU), Kunstmuseum Den Haag and the Zaans Museum, supplemented with archive material from the collection of the NISV. Visitors could step into a virtual social VR exhibition and admire digitized versions of pieces that are rarely or never exhibited.

Welcomed by the colorful building of NISV, the technical team guided you into the installation. Prepared with glasses, remote controls and a short instruction, you learned how to move yourself through the three virtual spaces of the exhibition. In the first space, you as a visitor also meet your other fellow visitors. The social VR system ensures that you and your fellow visitor can experience the same virtual world. To achieve this, the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) has developed a special camera setup. The installation records the images of the visitor with cameras, encodes and decodes the data, and displays them so that you can see yourself and the other in real time in the virtual environment.